Help, I know nothing of home theatre...

[tkam]

The Oppos traditionally support a pretty wide range of codecs, I've always liked them for the xvid support.

[Dusty Chalk]

It does do HDCD. Win!

Also -- regarding CODECs, what does it matter? Isn't the computer taking care of decoding the video? I could well be confused on this. Also, not sure how much video can be transmitted on USB2.0 -- anyone know? I know high-def takes up a lot of bandwidth, so I would presume only standard def?

[jinp6301]

*cough* PS3 does all that *cough*

[tkam]

Dusty, your not looking at it correctly, the Oppo is setup to be a usb host (just like your computer is). You can hook up other usb devices like hd's or memory sticks but you can't connect it to another host device (your computer) and stream stuff to it.

[n_maher]

The Oppos traditionally support a pretty wide range of codecs, I've always liked them for the xvid support.

Well that's good to know, but right now I'm on a waiting list for this:

http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/

From what I've read these things are supposed to be fantastic as an easy-to-use, flexible media streamer that'll handle just about any format you throw at it. They currently sell on Ebay for double retail.

And Peter, my current media device (D-Link DSM520) seems to be able to handle most downloaded content off of a USB 2.0 stick. If you were using the USB interface on the Oppo there wouldn't be another computer in the chain, it would be the decoding computer, unless it doesn't do what I think it should.

[Dusty Chalk]

Dusty, your not looking at it correctly, the Oppo is setup to be a usb host (just like your computer is).

Oh.

...

[Dusty Chalk]

Whee...

[OverlordXenu]

Well that's good to know, but right now I'm on a waiting list for this:

http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/

From what I've read these things are supposed to be fantastic as an easy-to-use, flexible media streamer that'll handle just about any format you throw at it. They currently sell on Ebay for double retail.

And Peter, my current media device (D-Link DSM520) seems to be able to handle most downloaded content off of a USB 2.0 stick. If you were using the USB interface on the Oppo there wouldn't be another computer in the chain, it would be the decoding computer, unless it doesn't do what I think it should.

I really wanted one of those, but I've been hearing that it transcodes the video to hell, making it blocky and terrible to watch with high-speed stuff (like sports), and text is really hard to read. Any truth to that, or are people just pulling crap out of their asses?