I bought a Studio Hybrid from Dell’s outlet section this week for less than $400. It was a deal I couldn’t pass up for a project that involved setting up a media center to play all my videos, music, view pictures, watch Hulu and so much more from my TV. Eventually, I have a plan of getting rid of all my DVDs and replacing them with media on a hard drive to free up space in the house. Having over 250 DVDs in my collection takes up a lot of room.
The Studio Hybrid came with a 2.0GHz Pentium Dual Core Penryn, 3GB of memory, 160GB 5400RPM SATA drive and a integrated Intel GM965 video card.
Here is a video of the setup.
Update: One thing I failed to mention about XBMC in this video that should be noted is the plugins available in the wild. There are Hulu and You Tube plugins that will allow you to watch their content from within XBMC. The only plugin that came with XBMC preloaded is a Apple Trailers plugin that will allow you to download all the movie trailers from Apple to view within XBMC.
#1 by John - May 9th, 2009 at 20:54
I got one of these for my wife for christmas and its great for videos like this. She uses it with both a small digital camera and her flip video.
http://www.amazon.com/Joby-GP1-A1EN-Gorillapod-Flexible-Tripod/dp/B000EVSLRO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1241916728&sr=8-3
#2 by Steagus - May 31st, 2009 at 10:00
What product are you going to use to rip all your dvds? What about copy protection of those dvds? How will that be broken?
I’ve thought of this also but finding the one stop solution software is proving troublesome.
Word?
#3 by ed - May 31st, 2009 at 12:24
A friend of mine recommended AnyDVD for backing up your DVDs.