An Ion based nettop seemed like an obvious choice.  I started to research the different brands and price points.  I settled on the Zotac Zboxmainly becuase it was the cheapest nettop I could find.

While at first glance, the Zbox looks like a great HTPC, it has some major flaws (like all nettops.  Here are the dealbreakers for me:

1. Too noisy.  The fan is surprising loud.
2. Runs hot. Very hot.
3. Sluggish Media Center responsiveness
4. Lack of integrated IR receiver

After trying it out for 6 months, I have decided to put the unit on Ebay and get something alittle more powerful and alittle less noisy.  One thing I cannot stand with the unit is that the Windows Media Center menus are really slow on the Zbox, Media Browser especially.  The system hangs on my large movie library and can take almost 10 seconds to start up Media Browser.  This does not seem like a big deal but those 10 seconds are enough to hinder the movie watching experience. The unit does get bogged down if you accidentally leave a movie running while navigating to another menu item.

If you are looking for a small form factor HTPC, the Zotac Zbox is not right for you.  The system performance is too sluggish, noisy, and runs hot.

Before I sell it, I might give Boxee a try and see how it performs.

DropBox is a great way to manage multiple media centers.  For someone like me, who runs Windows Media Center on 3 computers, making sure the latest files for Media Browser etc are running on all three computers is a pain.

DropBox does function alot like a shared drive on a server. The program becomes even more useful if you do not have a home server or network drive.  It is your own personal file repository.  You would just download any file you need for your media centers to your Dropbox and then access those files from every computer on your network.

The first 2 GB are free when using Dropbox.  That size should easily handle all of your potential media center related files like Media Browser, Shark Codecs, or an remote control app you want running in the background.

Using a guide from Avsforum.com, I have converted my entire blu-ray library to MKVs using AnyDVD HD, eac3to, and mktools. The video quality is superb and is still 1080p. I have converted all the audio tracks to flac, including TrueHD. Lossless compression!

I installed MediaBrowser on the Windows 7 machine along with the Shark007 codec pack. To my surprise, the whole thing actually worked. No external player, no copy protection, and no crazy sound card just for TrueHD playback.

Using an ATI 4670, the picture looks great and the audio is sent to my Onkyo receiver as LPCM, all over one HDMI cable. 5.1 sound and everything.

I have no idea if this will actually work on an extender but right now I could care less. One thing at a time. Plus I think Divx is working on an MKV solution that will work with extenders.

Now I need to set-up a remote. I got a Harmony 880 that hopefully will do the job. Is this ready for the mainstream? No way. Is it ready for nerds? Absolutely.