Such a device exists

[bignose]

If you have a ps3 or xbox360 download a program called Vuze it's a torrent program which includes streaming software. It's free and it streams video pics music seamlessly to your gaming device and smartphones.

[pinhead]

Lots of devices will stream video and connect to a computer, console, or server to share pictures, music and video.

However, you will need a real media player to do the real-time conversion of the video through hardware.

If you are building your own media library by ripping your DVD's & Blu-rays, you will have to transcode (convert) the files before hand to stream them. If you don't do this, the amount of data trying to be streamed will make everything choke. Depending on how fast your computer is, transcoding can take all night.

With a hardware media player, you can just pull off the .vob files from DVD or .m2ts files from Blu-rays or make an .iso if you have ripping software. You will still have to use something like Any-DVD HD to remove the copy protection but this takes minutes.

You should be aware that backing up your purchased, music, movies and games and will be illegal once Bill C-11 is passed by the Conservatives.

Fines for downloading content over the internet could be $20,000 per file. If you are streaming video or music over your own network/ devices, that will technically be breaking the law because you cannot convert it into a format to be streamed without removing the copy protection. That will leave us with Netflix (crap in Canada compared to the USA), Hulu (not available in Canada) or iTunes (Apple - big supporters of locking up their content)

Better rip your disks now while it is still legal because the bill is already in Parliament

[wolf_bluejay]

As I've been doing this kind of thing for a really, really long time --- I had a computer hooked up to my crappy tv, then DVD with USB, and an original Xbox with XBMC (Xbox Media Center).

Bang for buck -- a small zotac box (tiny computer with low power CPU and almost no fan noise at all), and download a copy of XMBC live (open source and free) and install it on a $150 box or an extra PC you have

Then buy a simple "Windows Media Center" remote and plug it in. XBMC has a easy to read at a distance interface, can play every movie format I've thrown at it, 1080p no problem, You simply connect it over you home network (or wireless) to you PC and play the movies directly from it without having to do the "copy to usb, move usb, playback movie
" for everything -- just go through the files on you PC directly, it even downloads cover art and movie info automatically.

It also does music, photos, facebook, youtube, etc. It doesn't do netflix yet.

It's polished, and clean and my daughter has been using it since she was 5, so it's really really easy to use. You can even try it out without installing it by running it directly from the CD. On my system it is up and running in under 20 seconds from the time I hit the power button.

An for those who want to get extra fancy -- if you have more than 1 of these, you can set them up to "sync" the video/audio on multiple TV's so you can move from room to room and have the same thing playing......