Media streaming / HTPC

I've been having a brief look into media streaming, does anyone have any recommendations? As I see it, there's three options:

• HTPC
  
• Media streamers
  
• TV + USB
  

A full scale HTPC is probably most flexible but expensive and although my TV does allow me to play content off a USB (not sure about external HDD), the interface isn't the quickest or most intuitive.

I've seen streamers like WD TV Live and Seagate GoFlex but does anyone have a favourite?

I'm really looking for something for film/TV show DVDs that is quick to navigate around and can browse via the name or the film cover - something like Kaleidescape would be amazing but that's totally out of my price range!

The other option is storage - I guess initially a 2TB HDD would be ok but maybe looking to a NAS in the future?

I don't own one myself, but I have used a Seagate GoFlex TV 1080P Media Player. It is quite nice, but the menus seem quite jumpy if you get what I mean. The animations aren't smooth. Other than that though, it does a good job for the price.

If you're handy with Linux then I'd recommend waiting until a little device called Raspberry Pi comes out. It is a tiny ARM based computer system costing between £15-£25 which will support a full Debian/Fedora installation and which can output through HDMI at 1080p. I can see few more ideal candidates for a flexible media streamer, especially at the price.

HTPCs can now be bought for around £100 now anyway. Ebuyer sell an emachines nettop with a good media hdmi output. Given that a good streamer will cost £70 or more, I don't see the point in them any more really.

Raspberry Pi looks interesting - but it is running a slightly bizarre hybrid Broadcom mobile phone graphics processor as its CPU (effectively a very powerful GPU but with a not so powerful CPU). Whether the more CPU-intensive pretty front-ends can be ported is going to be an interesting question. Different XBMC camps are saying different things - I'm hoping it will work. The work on dirty region rendering in XBMC should assist with this - it massively reduces the CPU requirement for skins)

Because the Raspberry Pi CPU is based on an ARM v6 core rather than the newer core models, Ubuntu support has already gone as they aren't maintaining binaries for ARM v6 architecture on their newer releases. There is a concern that Debian may follow suit after their next release. The upside is that one of the driving forces behind Raspberry Pi, Eben Upton, worked on the chip, and is working hard to ensure decent GPU access for open source software - so hardware acceleration of 1080p should be possible for open source software. Whether de-interlacing is handled for 1080i TV content is less clear.

There is also the PandaBoard. The problem with the latter is that although it has a more powerful CPU than Raspberry Pi, the GPU code is proprietary and tricky for Open Source players to use hardware acceleration with (current XBMC ports have to use CPU decoding instead - Raspberry Pi might have the edge here)

Another issue with a lot of Linux open source stuff (apart from MythTV) is that de-interlacing isn't always handled that well (as most users/developers of XBMC seem to be watching progressive content)

Apple TV2 running XBMC is an interesting solution - though haven't tried it myself I know lots of people like it. (You jailbreak your ATV2 to do this)

I run a couple of HTPCs - all self-builds - with Win 7 Media Center and a large server for storing DVD, Blu-ray backups, remastered content and Recorded TV (Server also self built) They work very well for me.

The Popcorn Hour media players are also very good (though not the cheapest) with the C200 having iPlayer support via its app store. (I have a C200 which also runs the DVD and Blu-ray backups from my server)