Building a media server.

[Ravic]

I plan on building a media server to host all my movies/tv shows and have it go to my TVs

My question is what type of server should I get? I don't want to spend a lot of money just enough to play HD movies.

I was thinking running XBMC through Ubuntu would help over running it through windows.

[vesseblah]

Basically you want a processor with built-in GPu that has enough power to decode all videos in software, no need to pay for graphics card. You also want three HDDs in RAID5 setup to maximize discspace and data integrity. If you need enough processing power to also encode or rip movies, you should look into 4-core Sandy Bridges, if it's just for playback AMD Llano based setup will give best value for money.

Important thing is to go through XBMC and your chosen linux distro's supported hardware lists to make sure you get best possible speed out of the chosen parts. There are also dedicated distros that boot staight to XBMC without any bloated Ubuntu crap that you should rather be using.