Media Centres & Players

Lacehim · March 2012

There seems to be a few of us with media centres and players on Crema. I'm just wondering what others are using in their home with their media. I digitised all my CDs to flac & mp3 a while ago, and encoded most of the kids DVDs too for their ipads and my ipod in the car (keeps them quiet).

Currently I have my videos, music, photos on an unraid server, an HP N40L which has been amazing. Small, quiet, powerful enough and only pulls 35-40watts. From that I stream media via DLNA using PS3 Media server over my wired & wireless network to my PS3, Samsung TV, WDTV, 2 iPads, 2 iPhones and XBMC running on my Macbook. It's all running really well, so much so that I'm intending on digitising my entire DVD collection.

I'm still using my Epson TW600 projector and 92" screen for watching shows, DVDs and playing games. I don't think I could go back to a TV for watching movies. It's like going to your own personal cinema.

If anyone needs any help setting up a system or has any questions let me know. Happy to help.

derrilex · March 2012

Bloody hell Lacehim, sounds impressive. Mostly right over my head but I'm slowly coming to terms with the techy stuff. In the process of ripping CD's to usb and /or Ipod since getting a new car stereo only to find that there is nothing on the market that will run a stacker ! Media centres intrigue me and seem a ideal way to get rid of clutter and the bucket full of remotes. Interesting to see where this thread goes.

Koffee_Kosmo · March 2012

I dont have a media centre because I cant find what I am looking for My requirements are A non fan system that works & marries with 1) High fidelity 2 channel & tube amps & DACs for digital music This includes local storage of music media in Flac or WAV What would also be nice is the media centre to have a read drive to rip CDs and store them Player software to be visible for track selection on screen and operated wirelessly by remote or via tablet/ pad Similarly with the movie, photo needs 2) Ideally - It has to work in 2 rooms for the TV functions e.g movie viewing 3) Internet to - Download and store or Stream & play direct from the internet 4) PVR functions to record TV & watch later KK

paranomia · March 2012

You won't find much to wonder at here :D a 2006 vintage XP Media Centre - noisy and ornery - kept limping along with tacked on BlueRay, extra couple of TB, Win7 upgrade. I've been idly looking at something new but it mostly does the job for our fairly low end needs.

derrilex · March 2012

One my clients is a real egghead ( no offense techies) and he has built his own. Freaks me out watching him use a wireless keyboard as a remote

Kelsey · March 2012

This might take a few posts to cover. I have a setup very similar to Lacehim's, but without the monster projector screen. My NAS is off-the-shelf rather than custom-built but my media centre is on custom configured hardware. You have two basic options. 1) Big complex setup with every option under the sun 2) Super-simple setup that's not as flexible Although I only have the one media centre at present, I've been investigating the multi-room setup option for a while in preparation for moving to a house. So, let's discuss.... [size=18pt]The Big Complex Setup[/size] Hardware required:

[li]Master media server, with at least one tuner card.[/li] [li]At least two low-power media centre machines[/li] [li]Serious network-attached storage, preferably a RAID of at least 4TB in RAID config[/li] [li]Gigabit ethernet routers and ethernet cable throughout the house[/li] Overview XBMC has plugins for PVR operation and can also be operated with diskless clients - that is, 'satellite' devices near the TVs that boot from a server, not their own internal disks. The advantage of this is that you have a single master library that maintains the database of what shows/movies you have and what has been watched and what hasn't. Start watching on one TV/Media Centre combo, pick up from the same spot in another. Configuration This master machine also acts as your PVR and as the download client for any internet-obtained files. It should be relatively low-power (because it'll be on all the time), but still powerful enough to run the PVR. It probably won't need a connected monitor and should probably live in the garage, along with the router and NAS. If you're wanting to push HD size video around your home network, wireless won't cut it. You'll need cable. The NAS RAID is for storage. If you don't know how a RAID works it's basically a bunch of drives (2 or more) acting together to either be faster than a single drive or have more capacity. In this case, we want it to have more capacity and also keep one drive in reserve in case of errors - if any single drive dies, a new one can be popped in and the data dead drive rebuilt automatically. The system doesn't go down during this time, it just gets slower. The individual Media Centre clients are tiny low-power devices that are designed to run HD video. The new Rasberry PI is a good example - about $25 AUD (not including shipping) for the board. All you need is some kind of case and a USB memory card to run them off. The right kind of case can be mounted on the VESA connectors on the back of your TV. These individual media centres boot from the master media centre and connect to the TV (or head unit) via HDMI. I don't know how they'd deal with your custom DAC requirements KK - while you can get XBMC for Windows, I don't know how it'd perform on low power units, or even if you could get the drivers and XBMC to play nice. You could, in theory, get a Linux programmer to write a custom driver set for you. All up, this is even more complicated that it sounds already. PVR functionality is a plug-in to XBMC and we'd need to choose the right variant of XBMC to effectively support it - which may or may not play nice with the diskless booting. In a setup like this, you'd start one step at a time - find someone to write the DAC for you, build the diskless booting and finish with the PVR. But as complicated as it is, it stands the greatest chance of doing everything you want it to. It also works beautifully with Logitech Harmony universal remotes, plus it now suports Airplay (haven't tried it - but apparently you can stream content direct from iPad/iPhone to XBMC) and can also be controlled by iPhone XBMC remote apps. It also connects to online databases for show/movie info and downloads thumbnails, synopses and more. It's awesome and it's beautiful.

Kelsey · March 2012

Now for... [size=18pt]The Super Simple Setup[/size] This one's dead easy and pretty cheap. Get two AppleTVs, connect them to your TVs. Buy a cheap proxy account (about $5 a month) and use a US credit card (or credit card service) and get an $8 per month Netflix account. Change the DNS server on the AppleTV. Boom - massive amounts of cheap, legal TV and movies ready to stream direct to your device. You don't even have to Jailbreak the ATV. It probably won't connect to your custom DAC and won't record a damn thing. It will, however, talk to your iPhone and iPad and if you eventually get a Mac you can leverage iCloud to (for example) grab the photos right off your devices and put them into PhotoStream, where they'll be available automatically to your ATB as a screensaver. Total cost $129 per ATV, then $13 per month.

Brett H · March 2012

Good info there Kelsey. I use the first setup but my modded Xbox/xbmc refuses to play HD so I now have two windows boxes running VLC for upstars and downstairs. I then have a big file share box that stores all media/documents accessed by our laptops (wireless N) and backing up to two only large ext HDDs (grab em in a fire and go go go). The enermax keyboard/scroll mouse are the best and both units have proved reliable and robust (shintaro and Logitech models were binned): http://www.umart.com.au/pro/products_listnew.phtml?id=10&id2=40&bid=2&sid=70730 For a while I used a laptop as a media centre with VLC and found that this worked well also and had the added bonus that it was.... a laptop... Bed time. No projector for me... 55" plasma and 32" LED upstairs. Wanted a 60" but in my house 60" is like 12 meters so the wife said "no, that'd go all the way o the fence" and I was to embarrassed to correct her... :rofl:

Kelsey · March 2012

For those not initiated into the mysteries of XBMC, it started out life as a media centre hack for the original Xbox. I've been using it that long too, but it's long outgrown its Xbox roots and now runs on all manner of operating systems. The best choice is usually some flavour of Ubuntu, but there's options for Mac and Windows. The driver support is better on Linux, however and you can get 1080p without dropping a frame on relatively low powed hardware provided the graphics processor is up to scratch. I definitely thing the RAID storage is a good plan - like Brett's setup it's a backup server for me too (although almost all of my work product is backed up in the cloud too) and easily accessible in case of a mad dash for freedom.

Lacehim · March 2012

I think there is also a WDTV hack that allows it to run XBMC. I haven't checked it out yet. Also all my media runs on cables. I've found wireless to be a bit hit and miss, but that might depend on how big your house is I suppose.

Brett H · March 2012

on 1332209927:

I think there is also a WDTV hack that allows it to run XBMC. I haven't checked it out yet. Also all my media runs on cables. I've found wireless to be a bit hit and miss, but that might depend on how big your house is I suppose.

WDTV + XBMC would be a killer system for the price!

Kelsey · March 2012

on 1332209927:

I think there is also a WDTV hack that allows it to run XBMC. I haven't checked it out yet. Also all my media runs on cables. I've found wireless to be a bit hit and miss, but that might depend on how big your house is I suppose.

Yeah, most of my bits are cabled as well, except for ATV, which is really close to the router anyway.

Brett H · March 2012

I am running the latest fritzbox and a wireless n repeater. I cabled the house with cat5e 10 years ago and am using those connections less and less. The bandwidth of some of the latest domestic hardware is amazing especially given its not at Cisco prices.

Kelsey · March 2012

I'm on the FritzBox also. It's pretty great, though it's still not ideal with the amount of devices I have running at once, even on N band. I think I'd still wire up my house even so. Are you running any repeaters?

Brett H · March 2012

Yep but not the fritz repeater. I use a bog-standard net gear repeater not running WDT.

Kelsey · March 2012

I've got a spare linksys wrt, might go ahead and flash that to cover the house more effectively and provide some b/g band love for older devices.

derrilex · March 2012

Ummmm, what ? Geez, I hope I'm not the only one that has no idea what any of you has said ??? :rofl: :rofl:

UNM · March 2012

Derrilex, it's not hard to understand. Kelseys box is on the fritz and his house needs rewired. He is on the lookout for love from oldies BrettH claims he is not repeating even though he is, but he lives in a bog need any more translations? :rofl: :rofl:

Brett H · March 2012

on 1332328142:

Derrilex, it's not hard to understand. Kelseys box is on the fritz and his house needs rewired. He is on the lookout for love from oldies BrettH claims he is not repeating even though he is, but he lives in a bog need any more translations? :rofl: :rofl:

Spot on mate :thumb:

on 1332317778:

I've got a spare linksys wrt, might go ahead and flash that to cover the house more effectively and provide some b/g band love for older devices.

Don't bother... I did and for as often as it was used just puts unnecessary extra load on your DHCP. Get an N repeater that's backwards compatible if you must and run it on a separate SSID... They're as cheap as quite expensive but undoubtedly delicious chips.

derrilex · March 2012

Ahaaa, I get it now. I think you fellas better slip down the chemists' and some IBS meds for the repeating and pick up some cream for that linksey wart on your DHCP (ouch) . Sexpo might be the place to pick up something "'backwards " compatible :rofl:

ash · March 2012

I'm in the process of planning on a new media centre build, based off an AMD A6 or A8 cpu. Strictly for media - no gaming as I'm not a big gamer. This will be for TV watching/recording and disc based playback and hooked into the home network. I've got a spare copy in Win7 not doing much which I'll use initially, but I'm looking at some of the open source stuff as well. Maybe mythbuntu or another linux based distro. It may be my first adventure into the world of linux! I've got a Thecus N7700 NAS filled with 7x2TB HDD's in RAID 5, which I've managed to half fill, to store all my media files on. Still got to rip another 150 or so DVD's to it, then I'll be reripping my cd's to flac and adding them on. I'm still tossing up whether to replace the 2TB drives with 3TB. By the time I decide on that, no doubt there'll be 4TB ones on the market... or SSD's will get cheap enough to use instead of mechanical.

UNM · March 2012

Replace with multiple one or two TB drives and go raid. Saves a lot of effort when a drive dies Edit. Forget that, I see you are already raid 5.

derrilex · March 2012

Just googled RAID. Wish I hadn't. I suspect that all of this gear, like all IT stuff is redundant as soon as its made. So, is there a device, 1 device, in a box, that I can buy off the shelf that does everything - Stores and plays back all forms of media in any format with mind boggling capacity, does games of any kind, lets you record 10 TV channels at once, lets you surf and download from the net, is a fully functioning computer with all the normal desktop stuff, can be used from any room that has a monitor/tv and keyboard etc..., etc.. ? PS, Kelsey, if you have covered it in the most excellent post above I'm sorry.

Kelsey · March 2012

I believe that variants on the Cost - Time - Quality triangle are everywhere. It's absolutely possible to have a media centre that does everything and might be easy to use, but it won't come cheap. In reality, XBMC is about the closest you're going to get - you could build a custom stand alone machine stick a bunch of drives and a bunch of TB tuners in it and get it to do all that. But the reality is that it'd be a hot, noisy machine that you wouldn't want anywhere near your living room. It's also true that you wouldn't use most of it's capabilities. You'd spend 80% of your effort building the remaining 20% of the features. For most people an AppleTV is good enough. It's cheap, it's easy and does most of what they want. Combine it with an iPad or other tablet and you've got a great general purpose computer for browsing the web, social networking and email as well as a media centre that does a lot of what you want to do.

derrilex · March 2012

Roll on technology - as long as its gets proportionally easier to use and much cheaper, which I doubt :D

Kelsey · March 2012

It totally is tho. I spent $5500 on my first bottom of the line Mac laptop 12 years ago, the horsepower you can now get for a fifth that price is ridiculous. The AppleTV is great value for $129 and the Rasberry PI is just ludicrous at $25. iOS devices are super simple to use and the iPad is cheaper with the new model - and for most general purpose tasks I prefer that to my desktop. If I didn't think I'd need photoshop, I would've used it as my sole work device on a recent Sydney trip. Xbmc can be tricky to setup, but there a projects out there with the aim of making it easier. My media centre cost me about $200 to build three years ago - these days I think I could do it for $75.

derrilex · March 2012

Fair call Kelsey. It is pretty cheap these days eh. The user freindliness aspect I'm not so sure about though ;D , maybe thats just me. I long for the day when I only have a screen and 1 box of tricks, 1 remote and 1 cable between the two that set up does everything known to man. Its pretty bad when you have to write a 3 page booklet on how to use the TV for the house sitter, or heaven forbid my parents. :rofl:

Brett H · March 2012

DX that's an easy one and a cheapie too but will take a little setting up. Get a universal remote that works with MMC or XBMC. I used a Logitech before getting media kb's. I used to have two logitechs, one for me and one for guests. The guest one was a $25 eBay cheapie Thad did 'watch tv,' 'watch DVD' etc. I have children and a life these days so the setup maintenance time for this is not worth the hassle currently.

UNM · March 2012

I formally throw down the gauntlet

on 1332414752:

My media centre cost me about $200 to build three years ago - these days I think I could do it for $75.

Get me a shopping list of what I need and I'll make me a $75 media centre. Has to be currently available items. Is raspberry.pi actually available? Thought it was still limited production and over subscribed. Should be fun. Even though I can't really spare the time, I know I'll learn something.

Kelsey · March 2012

My apologies UNM, I thought the Pi was available, hence that price point. When it is tho: $54 for vB, delivered to Australia. $15 for a case, delivered to Australia. $5 for a cheap HDML cable A spare USB stick or SD card. Controlled by the XBMC app for iPhone or Android.

derrilex · March 2012

I tell ya, sometimes its just easier ( and nicer ) to look out the window and watch life.

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