One of the guides we’re asked to do fairly often is a relatively straightforward ‘How To’ article on putting together a nice, low-budget build for a home theatre PC without too much trouble.

Windows Media Centre is gorgeous, but it's not everyone's cup of tea

The fact is that building your own home theatre PC (or HTPC) isn’t as difficult as many might consider it to be, but when you get right down to it, there will be plenty scared off the idea by the fact that they have to actually sit down and assemble their own PC to do it; it’s a process that many simply aren’t comfortable with (indeed, that’s the reason we’re currently running a series of Build Your Own PC classes).

Many have argued that the easier option can be to pick up a games console and repurpose that to serve as a network friendly media centre… it’s not too difficult and can save you money over building yourself a HTPC, depending on what kind of build you go for and what consoles you’re looking at.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360:

It’s relatively easy to recommend going for an Xbox 360 for a combination of reasons. The first is that it has managed to remain cheaper than Sony’s offering, the PlayStation 3, though if you’ll be using the device wirelessly then the Xbox 360 will work out that bit more expensive just because of the fact that you’ll have to pick up Microsoft’s proprietary wireless adaptor to let it join your network. The little things do add up fairly quickly.

The Xbox 360 is a fairly solid piece of kit to act as a media centre extension

Similarly, Nintendo’s Wii, while it weighs in at around the same price as the Xbox 360 and boasts wireless out of the box, will give you all kinds of headaches when it comes to using the device to stream media from a PC, and since it doesn’t boast a hard drive of its own, and let’s face it, it’s hardly practical to stream content from your main machine across the network to a device with only 512MB of memory… especially when you start to get into content you’ll want to see in decent quality.

In truth, it should be pointed out that the Xbox 360 is, in this case, not quite acting as a media centre in its own right, but rather connecting to a machine on your network and sharing the workload involved in getting content from there to your TV. To set it up though, you’ll need to have your PC and your Xbox 360 both connected to the same network, a feat perhaps more easily (and certainly more cheaply) achieved using a decent length of Ethernet cable.

The whole process is fairly painless, it should walk you through it neatly enough.

Once the two are on the same network, it’s a relatively simple matter of telling the Media Centre capable sections of both of them to talk to one another. Essentially, all you need to do is start Media Centre on the Xbox and it will guide you through the step-by-step of the whole affair from there, giving you an eight digit key to drop into the setup you’re presented with when you run Media Centre in Windows (provided you’re running Windows 7). We’d walk you through it, but the whole setup process kind of holds your hand, so it’s probably not necessary.

We were initially going to run through the various versions of Windows people might be running, but then we realised that there’s already an excellent page from Microsoft up that acts as a guide

For those of you not running Windows 7, things can be just a little different. If you’re running a Windows Media Centre edition of XP then you should be fine to just follow the instructions, similarly, Windows Vista should look after you just fine. Indeed, fully up to date copy of Windows XP, Vista or 7 should offer some Media Centre support, it’s just a question of whether or not you’ll be offered everything you need to do what you want to or not.

TVersity:

Of course, if you already have a console and are looking to share to it, TVersity is an excellent, free application that allows you to share content across multiple different kinds of consoles. It’s excellent for anyone who’s looking to stream videos you already have to a console you already have without incurring any cost, which is really an ideal direction to go in, all things considered.

Of course, TVersity's interface will change depending on your setup...

In our own experience, TVersity is both reliable and fairly user friendly. Moreover, there are guides available that cover setting it up with just about any console you’ll reasonably want to try streaming media through, Nintendo’s Wii included, if that’s a direction you’d like to take. All things considered, it’s a solid offering, and one that’s relatively easy to get your head around.

If you’re at all interested, you’d do well to check out TVersity. Considering the fact that it’s free, you don’t have too much to lose if there’s already a console in the house that could see use as a media player…

You can grab it from the official page here.

Mac Users:

There’s a raft of third party applications available to handle your media streaming for those of you who don’t run Windows, and each has their own strong and weak points that you’ll likely have to have a poke around and see for yourself in terms of which you’d like to roll with. Still, that won’t stop us recommending our favourite.

Playback's settings pane leaves very little the imagination

From our own experience, one of the best Mac applications to allow sharing to games consoles across a network is Yazsoft’s Playback, which will do equally well with the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, so if you’ve already got one console or the other around and happen to be a Mac user it’s a solid option. Indeed, Playback’s only downside is that there isn’t a free version of it available, but given the fact that there are relatively few ways to get your Mac and Xbox 360 talking to one another directly, that’s not so very bad a thing.

Playback also won’t break the bank, considering the fact that it costs €12 for three licenses, which means you can let it sit on any extra machines you have around the house and serve up content as needed.

We’ll rarely recommend spending money when the option is there simply not to do so, but Playback has been a positive enough experience on our side to recommend it.

Standalone Media Players:

The fact is though, that unless you’re going to playing games, you really won’t be likely to get your money out of a games console. Even then, given the fact that you’re taking up a games console to stream media across your network, it could well prove a fairly unpopular option with anyone you happen to share your house with.

The WDTV Live is an excellent media player in its own right, and the UI is just the icing on the cake

By contrast, something like Western Digital’s WDTV Live can be a far easier, cheaper option that’s that bit more user friendly. If you’re just looking for the easiest way to get as much of your media as possible from your network (or indeed from external drives) onto your TV then there are few things that behave quite as well as the WDTV Live.

Where other iterations of the WDTV (including the Mini and the WDTV HD) simply offer the option to plug directly into an external drive via USB, the WDTV Live also boasts the ability to connect to a network, which neatly enough opens a bundle of options for anyone with a decent Network Attached Storage [NAS] arrangement going on already.

Of course, it’s all going to come down to just what you want to do with the device itself, but considering the fact that an Xbox 360 Elite will set you back around the €230 mark, while the WDTV Live is just €106… at that price you can throw in a spare 1TB external hard drive before you start to hit anywhere near the same price as the Xbox 360.

It’s not a bad old deal, but certainly if people were looking for the cheaper, easier way to get their content to their TV from their downloads folder (as is often the case with people building a HTPC) it’s pretty much perfect. The UI is also absolutely gorgeous, so it’s hard to find fault with WD line of media players.

Closing:

By way of an outro, there are plenty of options we’ve tried but that didn’t make it into this list for one reason or another. Some were too expensive, others we thought might be prohibitively complicated given that this was a piece for people who don’t want to assemble their own PCs. That said, there are always going to be options we didn’t consider, so we’d be really pleased to hear about other people’s home media solutions if you guys would like to leave us a comment.

I’m sure there’s someone out there in commentland who has a really simply solution that shames all of these