Driving a Home Theater

Our family is upgrading to an HDTV for Christmas, so you might be surprised to learn that we don’t have cable or satellite.  In fact, we hardly ever watch television shows.  Our TV is mostly used for playing Wii games, watching DVDs, and streaming movies from Netflix — a really great service that I highly recommend.

Here’s the reason for this post:  we need some way for our TV to:  a) stream Netflix in HD, b) play ripped DVDs from a drive on our network, and c) play Blu-ray discs.  There are many solutions for getting things like this done, but I’m going to compare the products and ideas that we considered the most seriously.  Your needs are probably different, but I still hope you can use this information to make a better decision for yourself.

A discussion about Apple TV, Google TV, HTPCs, and Blu-ray players.