Media PC for living room - any tips?

Thirith · June 2014

While it's not urgent, I'm thinking that eventually I might get a media PC for the living room to replace my Blu-ray player. My main thinking is that with a PC it'll be relatively easy to avoid region lock - which is an issue for me because while most of my Blu-rays are European, I am a highly functioning (yeah, right...) Criterion addict. So far I've managed okay with the US PS3 I've got, but that thing is pretty loud, which takes away from the experience of watching some glacially paced Eastern European arthouse juggernaut where people whisper what dialogues there are.

What are people's experiences with media PCs? What kind of things are there to watch out for? How are controls/UI generally handled? (I don't think my wife would be happy to replace the current remote control with a Bluetooth keyboard...) What sort of price tag am I looking at for a media PC plus necessary peripherals and hardware?

Foomy · June 2014

For the price, unless your also planing on using the PC or you have some really odd need that can be only handled with something custom your just better off getting a blu-ray player + appletv/roku/wdtvlive/etc.

I would just suggest getting one of these: http://www.amazon.co.uk/SONY-BDP-S1100-Multizone-Region-Player/dp/B00BSYR4QU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403630509&sr=8-1&keywords=region+free+blu-ray+player

Thirith · June 2014

Thanks, Foomy. I didn't know that there were multizone Blu-ray players being sold where you didn't run the risk that they'd be reset after the next update and where you'd need one of those All-In-One remotes to get them to play ball again.

Foomy · June 2014

There still a littly fidly, but not that bad. It will auto-detect dvd region and just play. But for blu-rays you have to turn the player off, press 1/2/3 on the remote for the region you want and then turn it back on, but it will stay on that region until you repeat the process.

Less mess then a PC anyway, especially because Blu-ray on PC isn't region free either, so you have to run another program to change your region there as well.

Or the other option is to get a blu-ray player for each region, it costs less then one of the modded machines, but then you have 3-6 of them in your AV cabinet.

Thirith · June 2014

That's exactly it. At the moment I've got my European Blu-ray player and my US PS3. That's fine while I still use the PS3, but it is pretty loud and at some point I'll have played all the games I want to play. Part of me is considering upgrading to a US PS4 at that point, but since I no longer work for an American boss who travels to the US all the time and is insanely generous it's no longer quite as simple to import them. I miss working for an insanely generous American boss...

It is annoying, though, that while it's easy as anything to get region-free DVD players, their Blu-ray equivalents are still a rarity. Is there a good reason why they cracked down so much harder on region-free Blu-ray players than on their predecessors?

Penny Arcade

Quick Links

Media PC for living room - any tips?

Posts