Personal HD Video Streamers for Your Home Theater System

The Three Best Options

With modern television viewers turning to the Internet for the majority of their video and television watching needs, HD streaming over the Internet has become a huge necessity. With sites like ABC and NBC streaming videos in 720p, ISPs are feeling the demand. It can take a full day to download a video off of BitTorrent or similar torrent websites.

The end result of all is playback on your TV. It's no fun burning a movie to a DVD and popping it in the DVD player. That results in a huge amount of DVDs laying around the house, and if you destroy one, the odds are you will need to re-download it, as many people don't want to use their hard drive space for a movie they are likely only to watch once.

The only other option for this is to hook a computer up to a TV. This posses similar inconvenience issues, as many people only have one computer. It's obviously difficult to hook up the family desktop to the TV whenever the urge to see a movie strikes, and not practical in the slightest way. Laptops can be used easily, but that leaves you short a computer should you want to surf the web while pulling an all-nighter catching up on the missed episodes of Battlestar Galactica.

The solution for someone not willing or able to purchase another full computer, but who wish to watch HD movies and store them without any fuss, is an HD streamer - assuming you get your movies via the web instead of copying DVDs from Netflix, it is best to look for a streamer that connects to and automatically downloads from BitTorrent.

There are a number available that currently do this, and below are the top ones currently available.

Popcorn Hour

Popcorn Hour has released a BitTorrent HD video streamer that is small and relatively cheap. The device connects directly to BitTorrent via your Internet, and allows you to choose and download videos and movies directly to the device, thus eliminating the need for a computer and external hard drive.