It really depends if you want to lose quality or just buy lots of hard drive space. At $200 a tb you could just build a blue ray drive, hdmi out, 7.1 surround sound, hardware decoding beast of a media pc with a 4tb+ raid array easy as piss. (and pretty cheaply)

For a really cheap option you could add a BR drive to an existing pc for ripping and encoding only and use some sort of network play back device or something like this: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=572

anyway fuk portable cd, dvd, br, based playback what a pita.

audio wise you can get whatever quality you want, output digitally and use a DAC of your choice - anything from shitty onboard audio, to a asus sonar 7.1 sound card to a professional mixing desk type sound card that costs more than your tv :P

You've obviously got a decent setup to even have BR in the first place, so you need a real media solution, nothing beats having a trillion movies and tv shows and albums all on your fat media pc finger tips :P

The ps3 is probably one of the best solutions to be a media centre imo, run that with tversity to a pc with a blue ray drive or perhaps even a linux installation on the ps3 might get you into region free... heck there are only 3 regions so you could have two $200 br drives on the pc with two regions and the ps3 as the 3rd :P

also many movies are region free anyway

http://www.blu-raystats.com/Stats/Stats.php

And for the cost of that setup, you could have bought 3 bluray players from each region and a shit load of movies. A 4tb setup could only hold around 100 movies (complete rips) + the time to rip them (and with shitty download limits in Australia, you wouldn't be downloading rips).

Also have no 'nerd' issues to deal with as you do with a PC.

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[COLOR="Gray"]550Nm off a 2L... Just wish it was in the dak dak...[/COLOR]

and 100 movies costs how much?