The Glade 4.0

We're looking at a new TV for the family room in our new house. I'm leaning toward a Samsung LN46C630, but wondering if the C650 series would be better, given that it has a built-in Internet connection. The C630 series only has a USB port, through which you can stream video, pictures, etc. through a computer (with the "DLNA" feature), but no direct access. Just wondering how "brave new worldy" I should go. The C650 series runs about $100-$110 more on Amazon.

And, if anyone else has a Samsung, or strong preferences for anything else in the $800-$1000 price range, please let me know. Thanks!

Edit: Well, never mind. I pulled the trigger. Found the thing at Frys for less than the non-Internet connected price at Amazon; still had to pay tax, but if I pick it up, it ends up being about the same.

Look for a new post on setting up an HTPC

_________________
This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

I gave up on HTPC. Software costs can be a bit crazy and im cheap bastard There are some really awesome features with them, but trying to get my girlfriend to use sage or myth was next to impossible.

Really depends on what you want to do with it. Trying to get Dolby or DTS on anything previous to Vista, is a pain in the butt. I have a creative card, and there stupid cards only do Dolby DTS via Analog and not digital, and on top of that, have to pay $5 for the Dolby DTS rights via the card. Even then I could not get my receiver to recognize anything besides PCM Audio, installed Windows 7, immediately got dolby and DTS working. No idea on Linux and what its capabilites are for HTPC's.

I do want to give an HTPC another try with a spare 7 install I have.

I love the idea behind an HTPC and had one for a while, using it for Blu-ray, and well I download for the most part any TV I watch as I work when most of my shows are on. Blu-ray's for PC, come with non-full versions of WinDVD or PowerDVD, which only does Stereo Audio. You have to buy the full license to be able to do DTS or Dolby digital, just tha is $50 on top of the blu-ray player and at that point can get a stand alone of the same cost.

VLC is working on getting blu-ray working, but until that is done, to be able to get 5.1/7.1 via PC Blu-Ray, its just cheaper to get a stand alone blu-ray player.

Sage and mythTV really both work quite well as HTPC interfaces, I prefer Sage as there is a big user base seems to be, and worked a little better for me. Sage is a darn good DVR program. I would also recommend an ATI Video card, one of the 5XXX series, as they do audio/video over HDMI and can pass dolby/dts via HDMI, unlik most other sound cards.

Since then, I have just switched to using my PS3 or Xbox with Tversity and JamCast albeit I really cant use my PC if I am streaming something via Tversity, but it works and works quite well. For a 1 hour long show (41 minute) usually 10 minutes of buffering is all it takes and i have no stuttering or anything at all. Upscaling in TVersity works pretty darn well, but going from 720p to 1080p, almost doubles my buffer and severly pegs my system (i7 920 at 3.6ghz, 6gb ram, 1tb WD Black all my tv shows on, TVersity runs off my SSD), and pegs me at about 85% cpu usage. 720p, about 60% which is pretty much everything i have. Tversity just encodes on the fly.

One of the better sites I can recommend for HTPC questions/answers is avsforum, that was where I got my star in the forrary before I gave up

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdis ... forumid=26

I used to use an HTPC with SageTV. I've since switched to a SageTV extender (HD Theater 200), with the SageTV software running on my WHS box. I love this setup!

I don't have some of the functionality that an HTPC gave me - no browsing the internet, no native netflix streaming, etc. But the fact that I don't have to deal with any codecs, or that I'm not constantly fiddling with the system to tweak settings or fine-tune performance, or chasing down little hiccups/bugs in the system, has more than made up for it. The thing just works, right out of the box. Plays every video file I've thrown at it, with no problems. I could even get Netflix working, if I went through Play On, but I choose to use my Xbox for my Netflix watching. I also don't have to worry about heat or fan noise, anymore.

There are a lot of advantages to having an HTPC, and they can be a lot of fun to setup and use. But I always found myself messing with it for some reason or another. There was always another setting to change, or something to tweak to try and squeeze a little bit more performance out of my hardware, or something like that. I just couldn't leave the thing alone, heh.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Just picked up the LN46C650 and it's pretty awesome. I am not the most TV-savvy person, the last TV I bought was almost 20 years ago... lol

My wife and I spent a lot of time doing research, and this TV is living up to everything everyone has said about it. Didn't hurt that I managed to buy it shipped and taxed for $950, including the wireless adapter.

It took about an hour to set everything up, including the internet connection. Right now, maybe it's just the fact that it's new, but it's pretty cool with the Samsung Apps, it can run Pandora or Netflix or a bunch of other stuff right from the TV.

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Glad you like it! This is my second "new" TV (the first was a Vizio 32"er), so I think I"m already a little jaded. But it's nice, just have to really take viewing distance seriously. If I get close, I start seeing a bit of pixellation, but maybe I jsut need to tweak the settings still.

But, we watched a Blue-Ray movie last night, and it was pretty spectacular.

Gonna work on the network set up today (didn't get the wireless card, going with the cable).

_________________
This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge