[Ireality]

Hello,

I'm completely new to HTPCs and other XBMC Players. My only experience to XBMC goes down to a usage of OpenElec ona RaspberryPi. Which was rather unsattisfied as a ton of my Series (mostly Anime) were not indext properly (I used re-naming software and such) and couldn't find a proper solution for "Download this Series / Movie -> And Show it into my XBMC library"-automation.

This time I want to try to step up my game and find a working setup for my home.

My ideas were:
Small player + NAS.
Where the player takes the media from the NAS which gets downloaded by a torrent client and sorted with sabnzbd or similar.
or
Small Player + HDDs
Where the player would be something like a Linux machine which XBMC and torrent clients, though I don't know if auto-renaming / sorting would work on it.
or
A small HTPC with Linux / Windows which makes the auto-sort etc. much more easier.

I'd like to get some input from your community as I'm not sure which solution would be the easiest / cheapest (not necessary the main goal) and most solid one. Also hardware suggestions are welcome

tl;dr please help me get the right hardware


cheers,
Aleks

[Ireality]

*small bump*

[Dougie Fresh]

I have a few small clients + a home server. I like that setup. I can have a big-ish box out of the way somewhere and little mini-ITX HTPCs for the TVs. I can also access the media from my desktop PC. It's nice having it all on the network available for any PC (HTPC, laptop, desktop, phone, tablet, etc.)

[00b5]

I have unRAID on a desktop with 5 hdds (7 TB of storage) and all my clients stream from it. Its an assortment of ATV2s (on their way out), a desktop, an old c2d Dell laptop with HDMI out, and one raspberry PI.

They all use sql to keep in sync, and I have a plugin on the server that lets me update the library from its web plugin.

Works great so far. I use a FLIRC for the systems that don't have IR (and iphone remote for the pi at the moment).

Even the wife can use the various setups, so thats always a plus, right?