I’ll be using it almost entirely to just watch iPlayer, I’d quite like it to be able to stream HD, and if it comes with some sort of remote control then all the better.

Any suggestions?

What do you mean by cheap?

You can get a refurb PC for £100 and stick a HDMI video card for £20 in it.

If you want a remote get a mini wireless keyboard for £25.

doesn’t have to be as low as 100 pounds but ideally not much more than 250. Also it needs to get online tv over wifi.

Acer Revo with xbmc installed? buy a seperate remote control?

One of these
PC £100 with wireless

install one of these

graphics card £23

and one of these

keyboard £26

So, one of these with one of these remotes for example?

What winston_dog says… Though £85 is a tad steep for a low spec 6 year old PC, I recently gave away a higher spec Dell than that cos it wasn’t even worth £20 on eBay even with a fresh XP install on it! So you should be able to get a bargain shopping about on eBay…

Cheap desktop a few years old, new GFX card with HDMI out, and a TV card (if you want to watch TV live at all) will do you nicely.

thanks. I guess the only real drawback with these refrb PCs is that they won’t have HD output(?). and they’re a bit ugly but I can probably live with that.

Is there some reason why you wouldn’t just stick up an aerial?

iPlayer is flash based I believe, and so HD could be choppy on an old PC.

For what it’s worth, there are a few boxes which will stream online content to your PC but doing away with the need for a PC sitting in the middle. I think they’ll stream DLNA stuff to the tv too.
My local Tesco sells one and i’ve seen them in Comet. T3 magazine (i think) mentioned a few in this month’s/last month’s mag.

For a home cinema type PC you want to be looking at a mini-ITX system, no fan noise:

ebay linky

I would also be looking at the new AMD llano CPUs with a built in GPU, best multi-media value for price, if you can’t spec it yourself do a search for that.

If your just hooking it up to a HD panel then how about an Apple TV & just jail break it & load it with a browser of your choice, £100 job done.

I was going to say that; either that or a Blu-ray player, my Sony has iPlayer, LoveFilm etc all built in, and can stream movies off connected storage the USB port. Not quite sure why you need a PC to “watch iPlayer,” ‘s overkill.

Is there some reason why you wouldn’t just stick up an aerial?

Yes, I live in Spain. It may seem a bit extravagant to spend a few hundred quid on a PC just to watch iPlayer but when you’ve had 5 years of only Spanish TV to watch, it makes sense! We’ll probably end up putting Skype on it too.

2unfit – I have a slight aversion to Apple products. Will it run Flash ok (or is it only the iPad that doesn’t support flash)?

I’ll have a look at the other suggestions, thanks. Cougar, I didn’t know Blu-Ray players did that – ta.

Another idea…will an XBOX or PS3 do the job?

XBox or PS3 will also do the job indeed… Can watch iplayer, 4OD or many other channels all through my PS3…

what I was going to say

PS3 – then you’ve got a Blu ray player too

……. and a playstation

make sure to flip the bird to the tv licensing people 😉

2unfit – I have a slight aversion to Apple products. Will it run Flash ok (or is it only the iPad that doesn’t support flash)?

So did I, I have now fully embraced the lovely fruit as they just seem to work. I have no problem watching the Iplayer on my apple TV through an Ipad so I’m geussing the Iplayer doesn’t need flash.

float – Member
make sure to flip the bird to the tv licensing people

Funny as it was not mentioned that the OP is in Spain, I don’t know if TV catchup gets around the problem, but the Iplayer won’t work abroad unless you subscribe or pay for a proxy server 🙂

tier1online.co.uk do some good deals. I paid £130 for a 3ghz P4, 300gb & 2gb ram, & it came with a 19″ monitor. Streaming CBeebies iplayer is how it spends 90% of its time, & it works perfectly for that. Don’t know about HD though.

Eck, I live in Spain too and have sky tv. I have also got broadband in the house and 2 laptops but can’t get iPlayer, even when trying to use a UK ip address with ExpatShield.
How do you access it?
I just brought my sky hd box from the UK and got local guys to fit a larger dish. It only has one lead and horizontal wave pickup so I miss a few channels and can only record what I’m watching, also don’t get sky anytime feature but otherwise it’s great.

float – Member

make sure to flip the bird to the tv licensing people

Just tried it and it doesn’t work in Spain either

KT, can you not just fit a multi LNB to your new dish?

Cheapest way may be something like this not that I condone it in anyway, the new subscription iplayer app on the ipad is available in Spain & will stream to ATV & is legal, see it just works 😉

The best thing about using a PC for iPlayer is the desktop app that lets you download shows and watch later. No stalling and buffering.

I agree that the Sony blur-ray players are very good for iplayer and watching movies on hard drives, but I have found my old pc to much more flexible that the blu-ray. I’m lucky I can hide it away in a cupboard and fan noise is not an issue. With an upto date graphics card it copes with hd easily.

2unfit2ride – Member
KT, can you not just fit a multi LNB to your new dish?

Cheapest way may be something like this

Nice 1 2u2r- works fine. I’ll trial it for a month

KT1973 – VPN from simplyexpats.net
6 euros a month or 5 euros if you take an annual contract

PS3 – then you’ve got a Blu ray player too

……. and a playstation

well, exactly! However the wife thinks this is just a complicated scheme for me to get a PS3 – which isn’t entirely true, however the PC would let me downoad stuff and connect Skype too, so I’ll probably do that. I’ll have a look at tier1online takisawa.

That graphics card will run h.264 streams, as it has an on-board hardware decoder.

If its only the CPU decoding, it will not survive 2 seconds of smooth video!

If you do get that PC, increase the RAM from 1GB to 2GB minimum. They have 4x RAM slots IIRC, and max ram of 4 x 1GB sticks.

And most importantly – obstacle number one is getting iPlayer to stream to Spain…

thanks xiphon. Would one of these Eeebox be better?

I’ve sorted the iPlayer stream to Spain with a VPN.

I’m probably making this more complicated than necessary but I’ve seen this ASUS.
Is it worth getting this and buying some memory and a hard drive for it or is it not going to end up any cheaper?

PS I have no IT skills

Errrr, you’re looking at spending the best part of £200 on a pretty low spec 2nd hand box… WTF for?!?!

If it was £20-30, fine, no problems… For WELL under £200 excluding an OS (and you can just install Ubuntu for free if it’s only to stream iPlayer etc.), look at the following…

http://www.ebuyer.com/251310-zoostorm-desktop-7873-1036

Buy that and it’ll last you a good few years, rather than only just being adequate right now. Even better, add a cheap GFX card with an HDMI output on it, something like the following link, and it will play HD video til your heart’s content…

http://www.ebuyer.com/264008-asus-hd-5450-silent-1gb-ddr2-dvi-vga-hdmi-pci-e-graphics-card-eah5450silentdi-1gd2

EDIT: Or just buy the PS3! But certainly don’t waste any money on a PC that’s several years old already, unless it is nearly free… Like I said, my 6 year old Dell was higher spec than the first one mentioned, I struggled to give it away, and it had 2Gig of RAM in it and a seperate GFX card!

TBH – I’d build a Mythbox

Building your own DVR – MythTV Quick Setup Guide

I have an Acer Revo R3610/Win7/4Gb RAM and it will not stream HD content from a NAS drive or the internal HDD without a lot of stuttering and pixelation