As most people I am a fan of good music (Rock in my case) and movies where possible. I do this to relax and make sure that I can keep managing things 
For this I had setup an cool environment in my room to make sure I can enjoy that experience. First of all I have a linksys 24port managed switch (with 4 gbit ports) which makes sure that all my hardware can be attached to it and have some spare ports. These are splitted into a few VLAN’s to make sure there are certain barries that one has to cross before being able to use resources
Within one of those vlans is a fileserver (Guardian) together with a tiny device from conceptronic. This device is connected to my television (the device is HDMA ready) and connected with digital coax to my Logitech speakerset (500watt’s sustained, 1000 watt peak).
I have stripped many of my DVD’s and the DVD’s within this house towards the fileserver, and I play them throgh the conceptronic device. With that I gain digital quality for the sounds (Which is obviously better then the stereo output that I normally have for my movies) and I am able to easily select which movie or music I want to experience through the multimedia setup.
The connection from the multimediabox to the fileserver is arranged through NFS, which makes streaming media easy. Playing a movie takes around 8mbits of data, which is a good ratio for the amount of data that is being streamed.
I didn’t need to do a lot to set this up, just attach a few cables and make sure things are visible through the shares (Which is dead easy if you used nfs before).
