I bought a Mac Mini to run as an HTPC and returned it because of it's seeming inability to play back 1080p DD5.1 MPEG-2 Transport Streams ripped from Tivo perfectly. It had very slight stuttering issues - which I thought might have been due to the video card in the Mini.

I tried to run it with the following software: XMBC, Boxee, PLEX, Toast Video Player, and VLC. All had slight stuttering issues that annoyed me.

And all have wierd slow-motion issues when you skip from one section of a movie to another - everything slows down for a second and then goes to the correct speed.

I have a giant (for an HTPC) Dell Studio XPS 435 Tower with a Radeon 4870 video card in it and it had the exact same issues using XMBC, Boxee, Plex and VLC.

Interestingly enough Window 7 Media Center plays the streams *perfectly* with no stuttering or any other issues.

I tried the same files on a WD Live and they all played perfectly - but the lack of a real fast forward/rewind by more than 30 seconds is annoying on the WD Live. (And yes, I know you can skip 10 minutes ahead if you press two buttons on the remote - but not one minute, and not backwards.)

Is there a small, cheap media center box that doesn't have these issues on the market right now?

I think the Boxee Box might be the ticket, but I'm not sure when they'll be available. (And the Boxee remote application has some great features if you have an Android or iPhone device.)

Does anyone have a Popcorn Hour or other player that has a full featured media Center on it, with a good remote that plays large files without issues?

gettin a couple more gigs of RAM, win 7 & video adapter that'd do the trick. While doing the Win 7 thing seems like the way I'll go I might also toy around with the Linux alternative also (Mythbuntu) just ensure that I'll keep my nerd pass.

With the right codecs the video decoding is handled by the gpu and not the cpu. this allows machines with slower cpu's to handle hd with no problem as long as the gpu is new enough to support that funtion.

I strongly recommend the combined community codec pack.

I have a 3.06ghz iMac, and there's 1 video that it can't handle because of the insane bitrate spike in one of the scenes. Other than that, it flawlessly plays everything well. Cost of an iMac isn't reasonable for a HTPC, however.

Plex is great, but Quicktime (I prefer 7 over X) actually seems to work better for 1080p stuff and Quicktime is the only one that could have used hardware acceleration (your nVidia 9400m) to offload onto the graphics card.

If you're going the Windows route, I'd recommend using MediaPlayerClassic Home Cinema and CCCP (http://www.cccp-project.net/). CCCP will have MPCHC. Also, I'd recommend an nVidia card where you can activate CUDA, which will allow you to offload a lot of the work onto the graphics card, since most video playback normally just uses the CPU to do everything. This is a guide for anime stuff but gives you the general idea for playback: http://nunnally.ahmygoddess.net/watching-h264-videos-using-compute-unified-device-architecture-cuda/

i bought this a few weeks ago, and so far i love it.

it plays hella file types, has a hard drive bay, downloads torrents (with hdd installed), and comes with a HDMI cord.

i've played hd files with no stuttering issues, but my connection is wired through powerline networking. as for the fast forwarding issue, up to 32x.

it's $99 at new egg right now.

http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Office-High-Definition-Player-PCMPBO25/dp/B002Q4U9PY

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And then see how it compares to the Patriot/WD Live/Popcorn Hour/etc.

Thanks for the name of that product, I'll add it to the list.

in the meantime I've set my Dell XPS 435 Tower up in the TV room.