Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Anyone with a HTPC and a XBox 360?

I agree that there are better players out there, but I was hoping to eliminate my Panasonic S97 with the whole HTPC thing/XBox 360 combo.

Maybe a HTPC in the home theater (should beat any stand alone DVD player), and then a TV out card on the PC I am typing on right now? Then, if I had file sharing on, in theory, I could play the file off of the HTPC through this PC to our standard def TV in this room.

What if I had Media Center Edition 2005 running on this PC and Vista running on the new HTPC. Could they "talk" to each other and share kind of like having a Media Center Extender?

I'm just trying to maximize my features, and my wife LOVES DVR, so by getting DVR in the home theater, that is a plus, but if I can "displace" (or replace) the Dish DVR in this room, I could reroute the Dish DVR to our kitchen TV where she has been wanting it for years. Then all of our TVs, AND the home theater, would have DVR and not just 2 TVs...

Of course, that would mean no XBox 360 for games, but that is OK, I guess...

Thoughts? Ideas?

The MCE community has been asking for a client/server peice for a long time. There are some hacks you can try to have the MCE PC without the tuners look to the other box to play back what it recorded. Also to have one machine save it's recorded TV to a network share. None of it is optimal and I can't speak to how well it works because I haven't tried.

My friend tells me his 360 looks good enough while playing DVDs, he says the only time he can tell the difference is it he pauses it and compares, and nobody watches DVD's paused ;-)

But if you put the HTPC in your HT room, just get a 360 for the other room? Is DVD playback as critical in this other room? You'd be able to do all the TV recording on the HTPC and play it back in both locations.

Oh and any XP SP2 machine can playback the recorded TV of a MCE box. The only exception is the new cablecard HTPC's which isn't being considered here I believe.

Possible new life for HTPC's on cable...

http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/archive/2007/11/04/1282159.aspx

The link is timing out.