It's been awhile since I've posted, but I've been busy moving homes, etc. Now that we've moved, I have more opportunity to dig into some of the more recent HTPC happenings.
The Nvidia Ion seems to be a fairly promising platform and seems to have received decent reviews and it's something I'll definitely be considering in the near future. In my new home, we completely gutted the kitchen and rebuilding it. There's a small wall between two large windows that is too small for a cabinet, yet a 20+" LCD mount would fit perfectly. Coupled with a small Ion PC, I'd be able to stream TV, media, music into the kitchen for the small eating area. First things first though, finish the kitchen =D. While GPU assisted high def playback works great on the Ion, my main concern is how sluggish frontends like Mediaportal or XBMC would be with the fancier skins like Mediastream. The lack of wake-on-USB on the Zotac boards is a deal breaker for me, although Anand from Anandtech has reported that a rev B with wake-on-USB will be released for the Ion mobos, although I'm not sure if the GF9300 mini-ITX mobo will get it.
At my previous home, the layout was conducive to pulling cat5e to the areas that needed network access, however my new home is not. My internet access terminates in one corner of the upstairs of the house and the TV is in the opposite end. My server needs to be downstairs for cooling, coax access, etc. In a pinch, a coworker gave me a pair of version 1 Powerline adapters he didn't need and at least I was able to setup my server in the basement and have connectivity, getting a peak of 15Mbit which isn't too shabby considering they were V1 products. I had been doing some digging on how fast the newer Powerline AV products were, and the Netgear XAVB101 seemed to stand out amongst various devices available. I found several reports of 90-96Mbit real world transfer speeds. While this isn't close to the 200Mbit theoretical it is definitely a useable thoroughput. Two days ago however, Belkin announced a gigabit theoretical Powerline AV adapter using the Gigle Mediaxtream chipset. Now no one believes for a minute that these devices can do real gigabit, but if they can do 200 or 300Mbit or more, these things would be a real alternative to dragging cat5e or wifi dropouts. The Belkin F5D4076 Powerline AV adapters are supposedly available in North America and were available for order at time of the press release but have since been sold out and back ordered.
