Central Video Storage to HDTV, Media players and PC to TV

[victoriabears]

Like many others I suspect, I have a large collection of divx stored on dvd , and conventional dvd ;s and the temptation of storing them on hard drives for easier access is calling me.

I have tried to output via HDMI from my laptop to my 46" sony LCD but the picture quality using VLC media player is just not as good as using my Philips 5990 or Pioneer 420 dvd players, I continue to be impressed by these machines.

Is this a drawback of the graphics cards and is it possible to simply use a computer, I am lucky as I have have behind the TV to easily place a computer with its own Hard drive storage and then connect via hard wired lan or wireless, I also saw there are devices for using the power lines in the house.

Are there wireless mice and keyboards which will work at 8 foot distances.

I have discovered that the Philips with work with a 2TB (fat32) external hard disk via usb whereas the Pioneer seems to find this size too much and will not work with it.

So it seems my choices are:-

use a WD Live!/Popcorn/Apple TV media player but I want to be able to manage the files wherever they are stored, rename, delete move etc from whichever device I end up with. Your advice and thoughts would be most welcome, I would like it to use NTFS format dives and play MKV.

A computer, providing I can get the picture quality. I have a 6 month old dell with W7 and ati radeon HD5670 video card, would that be good enough, it has HDMI.

Continue to use the dvd players , is it possible to use usb hubs?, as I am never planning to trust a hard drive with my Video treasurers so eve if I transfer my whole collection to Hard drives I would keep most of the discs. I know about RAID storage but really its too risky.

I really would welcome your observations, experiences with certain hardware and advice-thanks

[aedipuss]

i use a network attached storage device with dlna. i would never trust my video to disc based media alone. i have hard drives from the early eighties that still work perfectly, but i don't think cd/dvd media is quite as good?? my old cdrs especially svcds with no error correction died fairly quickly. dvdrs may last a bit more but i'm not counting on it. currently i use a plextor 4 bay nas with 4 - 2tb hard drives. i have also used a zyxel 2 bay, but it wasn't fast enough to stream to multiple devices at once. you'd most likly need to move up to a blu-ray player with network support to take advantage of a nas. i have both an lg bd570 and lg bd670. both were in the $150 range and worth it.

[lowellriggsiam]

I use a network storage device attached to my router and stream (I guess I could use one of my PCs for the same purpose as I did it with drives attached to my PC for the PS3) to my Samsung bluray player (streaming wise it is limited to wmv/avi) attached storage wise it a broader acceptance (mkv/mp4). I have a segate freeagent media player and a Western Digital Live + Media player that play just about everything that you throw at them, but have never hooked them to my network. Reading about them when I bought them they were capable of using an NAS to play streaming media.

[victoriabears]

From what I have read using a computer output to a TV is less than elegant way to watch video and it is better to use a media player even if streamed froma PC, is that true?

[aedipuss]

i consider my lg blu-ray player to be a media player, as it accepts avi, mpg, divx, xvid, mkv from the dlna nas and plays them on the tv or it can also play any video in a shared folder on any computer on the network. but why have computer on using 300-500+ watts of power, when the nas uses only about 50 watts.