All the DVD, Blu-Ray talk got me wondering. Anyone else doing media streaming for movies? I just got started 3-4 months ago. And it's really cool.

Essentially you rip all your DVD's to a big hard drive. Then instead of swapping DVD's in and out when you want to watch a movie, you select your movie from a list and push a button.

The hard drive storing the movies can be attached to the computer that plays the movie on your TV or it can be networked.

And it can either be a computer playing the movie (HTPC - home theater PC) or a dedicated device.

I started with the dedicated device (a Popcorn Hour A100) and while it's very nice, the more I look into it, the more I'm leaning towards a HTPC.

The main reason is that to make a really nice list of movies on the Popcorn Hour takes a bit of manipulation, HTPCs can run XBMC an open source program that automatically makes gorgeous selection screens.

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/29133065@N05/ for example.