Widescreen Gaming Forum

Frankly, I'm in the same boat with these guys. If you're going blu-ray, and building your first major entertainment center, then yes, PS3 is your ticket. I went the other route with the Xbox360, and i'm perfectly happy with it, even as an inadequate media player. I have to transcode literally everything I get in order to be able to watch it on my projector. And if it's in HD, i'm waiting a day for it to be transcoded over. (God I hate microsoft for making EVERYTHING proprietary on that box...)

My cousin's PS3 when it was over looked REALLY nice on my projector, so that's a possible route for me if I want to go to Blu-Ray as well, but I get the same thing from certain special places from special friends who have the same interest as high definition as me. And I use a computer already as my HTPC, which reminds me, I need to switch to a Silverstone case. Anyone wanna take a look at those and pick a nice silver one out for me? $200 or less, as many neat features as possible though. (I do enjoy those front status displays, but one with a 7 inch touchscreen would be even cooler.)

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Current build: Intel i5-4670k | 32GB DDR3 | RAID0 2x250GB 850EVOs | nVidia GTX980Ti (MSI G1 Gaming Edition) | SoundBlaster Zx | Dell 2405FPW (Landscape, primary) & HP w2338h (Portrait)

One word of warning. The PS3 will only playback AVI and Mpeg2 files. If you have downloaded movies on Xvid, MKV or RMVB. You'll have to use a transcoding program on your PC to decoding those program before sending it to the PS3. I don't know if there is a Mac version of Tversity but you might need to dig around a bit.

Also. The biggest pain on the PS3 is that it does not come with a dedicated media remote. Unless you are comfortable using the game controller to control you media playback. You'll need to order this too:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16879261053

Haha, already have that remote in my Newegg wishlist! As for the streaming of movies, I have a few in avi/mpeg2 format already, but I don't see why I can't just play them off my MBP hooked to the TV directly with a DVI to HDMI cable.

Will probably be the best solution for me, but will definitely go the PS3 route. Thanks for your help and words of wisdom. Scouring the AVSforum for panel info as we speak!