Help with HTPC Frontend and streaming

XBMC allows hardware acceleration under Windows on NVIDIA and AMD, and on Linux with NVIDIA. It uses whatever codecs your GPU supports. We support H.264/MPEG-2/DiVX/XviD/MVC/VC-1/WMV-HD/Blu-ray/BD3D up to 42Mbit in hardware on anything from the E-350 APU all the way up to the 7970.

XBMC has a Netflix plugin, which is very good, called XBMCFlicks. It works with the Canadian Netflix.

I can't speak to XBMC's capabilities as a multipoint streamer, however.

The A6-3500 will do the decoding I described on Windows: H.264/MPEG-2/DiVX/XviD/MVC/VC-1/WMV-HD/Blu-ray/BD3D up to 42Mbit, which is the highest bitrate currently utilized in the market (Blu-ray).

That A6 should be just fine without an additional dedicated GPU for your purposes with XBMC. For streaming I would go ahead with Plex for serving up the media and grab a couple of Roku's for the other TV's. The Roku's are dead simple to use and work well with Plex (I have 2 XS's myself). Not to mention the Amazon channel on the Roku's is the best there is.

All AMD Radeon graphics chip branded with "HD 6000" or "HD 7000" have (more or less) the same hardware-accelerated video decoding block. That means any APU and GPU we currently manufacture has the same decoding capabilities described above.

I think the A4 would work just fine as well. The only problem is you might run out of horsepower with Plex if you need to do some transcoding on the fly with it with multiple streams. I run Plex Server on a AMD Athlon X2 at 2.5 Ghz and that transcode h.264 without skipping a beat on a single stream.

I should have clarified earlier. You will want to run Plex Server for streaming. It runs in the background and you really don't need to mess with it much beyond initial setup. Just point the Plex software to the directories where your media is stored and then leave it be. Now you could run Plex as your front end setup but me personally I like XBMC more. Just set it up like normal and have all your codecs installed and it will be fine.

The only issue I see with that is that both XBMC and Plex Server are going to want to add media art and metadata for your media. Just tell one of them not to do it or just use the same sources and I doubt there will be much issue. I can't speak from experience here as I have a separate servers and htpcs.

Now for the Roku's. I don't see a Just for Kids section at the moment within the Netflix channel. While browsing there is a children and family movie recommendation list. There is however several channels that are meant for kids aside from Netflix. Disney is the main one I am thinking of here.

BTW: Roku sells refurbs with the same warranty as new one much cheaper here.

EDIT: Added link for Roku units.
Edited by Kylepdalton - 8/10/12 at 8:34pm

I have a A4-3400 in my HTPC and only use it to play files stored on the hard disk or from my NAS and I have no problems with even HD content. I hope that helps.