Ever since the Apple TV came out, I've wanted to buy something to connect to my HDTV. However, the Apple TV only plays iTunes content and doesn't really store that much stuff. When I moved to the new house, I looked into a few Windows based media servers but I haven't bought anything yet. I recently talked with a coworker who bought a HP media server and was happy with it.
Right now I have my media spread across two computers with music/music videos on my Mac and everything else on the Sony Vaio. Each computer then shares its external hard drive (500GB on Mac and 1TB on PC) so other computers in the house (4 more) can access the files. I think this would be much better to centralize all the media files in one place. I have ~150GB free on each external HDD now and this would add another 1TB so I can move a bunch of stuff I backed up to DVD-Rs back to live access. It's ~$510 on Amazon.com though I think I can get it for $454 through HP's employee discount program. Since it doesn't play files, I still would need a computer or some other media player connected to my TV.
Alternatively, I can just start deleting stuff after I watched them. I have a tendency to "collect" stuff, both physically and digitally. Each 60 minute TV show (less commercials) is ~350MB and movies run anywhere from 700MB to 1.3GB. A lot of the Korean TV shows I record rips to ~850MB if I use a decent data rate of ~1.5Mbps. If I want to keep everything, then I probably need the server and additional HDDs as well.
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