Best way to serve media files from PC to TV

[abyssinian]

I use both a WDTV box on my main television, and a dedicated laptop with XBMC on another. I love the responsiveness of XBMC over Windows 7 Media Center, but admit that WMC has a nicer look. After trying a couple of other setups, I have settled on an external drive on each the WDTV and HTPC (laptop) for media file storage. All permanent files are copied to both external drives.

The HTPC has the advantage that it will never be limited by firmware restrictions, and is ready for any future sources I may want to try. The WDTV is nicer for being faster, significantly smaller, essentially zero maintenance, completely silent (no fan), and will operate directly from my universal remote.

 

[cyabro]

I have a basic file server that sits in the corner doing most of the work us at home.
It's an AMD Phenom X2 with 4GB RAM running Win7 64bit.
It has all our data stored on it, docs, music, photos, videos etc that we access over the network from two laptops and the media PC, which is connected to the TV.
It has a 360GB HDD for the O/S, docs, photos & music.
THere is a 1TB HDD for movies, videos etc and a 2nd 1TB HDD for recorded TV.
There is a USB HDD for backups.

The server also has a quad DVB-S/S2 tuner card in it and is running MediaPortal's TV Server.
The two laptops and the media PC have the MediaPortal client installed on them so we can watch or record live TV from any of them.
If we set anything to record it's all done on the server so it's the only machine that is left on 24/7.

The media PC is an Asus Eee Box PC with an Atom dual core with the nVidia ION graphics card that has HDMI output.
This can pretty much handle anything we throw at it.

The server is also running 4TheRecord so we can access the EPG on the server remotely and set anything to record if we are away from home.