[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]id love a pc to stream video, problem is that i used xbox and ps3 to do it currently, and both refuse to play everything i throw at it... hell even the majority of it. for this to work good for a streaming box it has to play every format, from ones are popular, to the un popular and run the shells that the videos get put in to too, like mkv.[/citation]These aren't really intended to be on the decoding side. They'd be great for feeding the video over the network (or other NAS purposes), firewall/routing, etc. But they may not have the punch to handle all HD videos.
Just build a cheap low-power box and run a full-blown OS (Win7 or a Linux distro), and put a good media frontend on it. Even an E-350 should be able to do it, provided that the player you're using has support for hardware acceleration via the APU's GPU.
Heck, if you wait for Llano, not only will there be fairly low-power variants (not as low as E-350 but still pretty low), but it'll have more than enough horsepower to handle ANY video you through at it.