Im just wondering if there is any problems running movies off of an external harddrive? Like lag or w/e. I just thought having all my movies on a 500GB HD would be bitchin lol

got 2 500 gig harddrives in my emachine with 1 gig of ram its a 3.2meg celeron... I been watchin movies all day and night .. Use VLC media player for windows... then go to settings and extend gui settings to set contrast and brightness.. then click right mouse on the movie screen and choose aspect ratio of 16:9 is what I always do and have no lags... Just watched the replacements today and it was pretty good.. it was a divx file at 749,000 k ....

I watch dvd movies and Hd-dvd movies off my external 500gb Usb 2.0 drive.

No problems here.

Me too. .5 TB Seagate External USB 2.0

It makes me feel better to archive to an external drive and only use it when I need to. Drives don't wear out when they are off. With HD prices nowadays, they are pretty cheap/reliable for $ / byte. Good idea you had there kawana.

I usually throw the movies I record onto DVD in xvid so I don't have to buy an HD.
Sure I now have a binder full of DVD's but i've had HD's die on me before so i've been soured on the idea of using an HD as media storage.

I got one of these off ebay for $3!!!! Well I also had to pay $30 in S/H and it took 2 weeks to get here.
http://www.kitsparts.com/shop/index.php?ma...products_id=412
They use laptop 2.5" HDs. I'm currently using a 10G from an old ProStar laptop. Soon to upgrade to a 500Gb. It's cool, load movies, mosic, pictures, etc. and it has built in Codecs such as MPEG and DiVx. Well I love it! And it has a audio coax out for PCM 96kHz surround audio!

A 500gb laptop hd? Where?

I think this is what he might be talking about

http://cgi.ebay.com/3-5-500GB-HDD-MP3-MP4-...VQQcmdZViewItem

pretty freaking sweet plus its great for us that have only VGA

That is a 3.5" HD, which are in abundance.

I do believe that they will soon (if not already) release a 2.5" 500GB HD for laptops.

I'm just using my modded Xbox running XBMC. All my movies are stored on my NAS that currently holds 500 GB. I love my NAS. It acts as a fileserver (obviously) but also as a webserver, ftp server, bit torrent downloader. Here's a link to it. Note mine is the ds106e which is apparently discontinued now, so here's the new version. The company is fairly good with their firmware updates which is nice. What I like most is that it is much more energy efficient compared to having my PC running 24/7.

What kind of interface/frontend does that thing run? Does it have analog audio out as well as composite video?

Thanks.