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How Do You Handle Home Media?
carpoolio writes "Yahoo's Tech Tuesday has an interesting series on bridging the PC/home entertainment gap. The solutions are fairly complicated, and very Windows-centric. As I store more media on my PowerBook, I'm finding more ways I can't listen to or view it on my stereo and TV. One example: TiVo Desktop won't stream AAC files - only MP3s - from iTunes to TiVo. That's an easy fix, but still: how do you get stuff off of your computer and onto your TV, stereo, etc.?"
By jacking the audio out from my computer into an AUX audio in on my home theater. I play my music loud enough that the noisy pc fans aren't a problem. Video out is another story. My mini-ITX box combined with Windows XP provided horrible results.
It's all Hood
TV-out with an old Voodoo3 3000 and a simple 16 bit cheap SoundBlaster from 10 years ago to cheap cables. I mean, after all, it's mostly divx or another format for downloaded movies.
;)
For serious music I usually burn the SHNs/FLACs to CD and play them in my stereo.
I have tried using my Tivo for MP3s but I just don't see the point. Maybe if I could use it for video I would. That would be a lot easier than screwing around with TV-out and waiting for the screen to resize, etc. I have a feeling that won't come to fruition from Tivo though
I bought a low-end Dell server with room for a lot of disk space, a 160gb drive (for now), and a $5 sound card. Converted all my CD's using EAC and FLAC and at the moment am using flac123 to play them. Sound out the server, up the wall, across the ceiling, up through the ceiling into the livingroom and into the stereo.
Works great. One of these days I'll put a web interface on it and be done with it.
That's exactly what I do. I run the ccxstream server from my linux box for content on demand.
It's wonderful.
this has been an issue I (we all) have been fighting for a while. I recently saw an interesting system called sonos (www.sonos.com). It's an amp with built in mp3 decoder and wifi/wired connections. It comes with an ipod-with-screen based remote. You can connect them together and use one as a standard RCA input (for things like a tuner, dvd, etc) and all other amps share that central source. All amps play mp3s and stream web radio. This does not come out until later this year.
For now, I'm using Tivo home media and not really loving it.
I am running into similar problems with getting my media from my PC to my entertainment center. The best solution I have seen to date is to build my own PVR. I have even managed to find ATX cases that look just like the stereo components I have, with little LCD displays and all. The hardest question I am having is which software to run? Windows Media Center is the best option so far and I am not thrilled with it.
I use MythTV, of course! Actually, I use KnoppMyth, but -- same thing.
FABULOUS TiVo replacement, but sometimes a bit hard to get working, especially if you only have seemingly random hardware, or just whatever is laying arround. The machine I dedicate for this is piped into my TV, stereo, local network, and it is convenient to drag-and-drop whatever media files I want (including MAME ROMs!) onto the MythTV box, and play away! Check it out, it really is worth it. Use an MPEG tuner card if you can.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
My computer is my TV/stereo. I got a cheap TV tuner a couple years ago and it works fine, and I have my computer connected to my stereo. As a cheap college student, this is especially good as it also saves cash (TV tuners are much cheaper than TVs and I don't have to buy a seperate set of PC speakers) and space.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
I have a notebook setup just for this. The bad thing is that it has an ATI card in there for TV out which is a pain to get working with Linux, so for now I'm just using Windows. I can play vids for the kids and stream my favorite radio stations.
The next step is to get MythTV running on the box, which has a much easier interface and can do more, such as image galleries, etc...
The biggest problem I have is input. Right now the notebook is on top of the entertainment center because of the aforementioned kids. And it's running windows so things like forcing video out is a pain, plus my wife doesn't know how to work it. And what idiot decided that play/pause in media player should be Control-P instead of space.
My main mythtv box has a remote controller for the video capture card, but I have nothing to hook to the notebook. I guess I need to bite the bullet and either buy some cheap IR receiver for use with lirc or threaten to burn the house down by building my own.
I'm surprised no company has come out with a USB based IR receiver that can be taught so you can control all your apps with it. Seems like a simple little item, not much needed to make and could be sold cheap enough to return a decent product and get lots of people to buy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'll second. I actually serve my content to XBMC from Samba shares on a box running ArchLinux.
No AAC support, but then, everything I buy from iTunes I immediately burn to CD and re-rip as MP3 anyway... I've had to rebuild my desktops too often to not burn a physical copy of anything I buy electronicly.
With the DAAP Protocol It works great with iTunes Playlists...
I just wish I could get it to listen to the party shuffle stream, or if they could break the airtunes protocol so i can "Send to Xbox" from my iTunes, it would be the best item I have used for my xbox
moo.
Very media centric multimedia system for linux: http://mms.sunsite.dk/
I keep all of my music (1400 tracks) on my computer and play them with juk. I don't bother to play them on the stereo at all. I have a powered subwoofer and four speakers on my pc which can put out far better sound then my small aiwa 3 disc changer, with two non powered speakers.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this. But there is a product for the Playstation 2 called Gameshark Media Player which allows you to connect to a PC server (running windows or linux) and stream video, music, or even pictures to your television.
I've only played with it a little bit, but so far it seems to be very usable.
For audio, I have a device called the Audiotron from Turtle Beach. It can stream MP3's and full size wav files from Windows or SMB shares, and is really easy to use. It can also stream from some Internet radio stations. Very cool device, and it fits in perfectly with the rest of my black stereo stuff.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
Evil, evil Wal-mart has the philips dvp642 for like $80 or less. It is a dvd player that plays divx and a million other formats. I can fit 9 hours or so of reasonable quality mpeg4 (divx) video on a dvd-rom. At 9 hours a disk it isn't the best quality but it is good enough to get 18 episodes of teletubies and boohbah on a disk -- which keeps my 7 month old happy for quite a long time :^) Certainly the cheapest way to go especially if you need a new dvd player anyway.
I second the Airport Extreme. An added bonus is the AE's mini-TOSLINK digital optical output.
We have an old laptop running XP in our entertainment center in a component slot. Hooked up to it is a wireless keyboard, which floats around the living room sofas with the same random Brownian motion of the rest of the remotes, with the exception of never getting lost between the cushions.
It's a bit of a pain to use, because it's old and slow, but it gets the job done. I think part of the problem is that it's very difficult to cool--we tried running one of those fan-pads underneath it, but it was rather noisier than we wanted in our AV setup...
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
I acquired a "broken" Neoware thin client which serves this purpose quite well. I simply netboot it from my main box, have it run X and esd, and connect its sound output to my stereo system. Its built-in sound isn't so great, but it's got a free PCI slot, so I can plug in just about any sound card I want.
Squeezebox is the greatest thing ever invented. The Shoutcast plugin for it is awesome.
there's no place like ~
I have a wired network with ports at my entertainment center.
I keep my Sony Vaio notebook on my entertainment center, and have it plugged into one of my TV inputs.
I use a Logitech wireless mouse to control the Notebook from the couch.
I use Media Player Classic to play all my media files off my desktop, thats in a different room, over the network.
Media Player Classic even plays DVDs (physical or mounted ISOs).
I used to use the same setup with WiFi before I wired my house up, for the most part it worked fine with only a few hang ups here and there on downloaded media (encoded). But when I started to want to watch DVDs I hit a wall, WiFi couldn't keep up with the demand.
...From my G5 in my office, to the projector in my home theater. This will probably be the kiss of death to my web server, but oh well. Check it out HERE.
I can flip the input on the projector to the VGA connection from the Mac, and see the G5 desktop, including the iTunes visualizer (very f'n cool!). iTunes audio is transmitted wirelessly via AirPort Express and AirTunes. The projector has a USB output port, which is plugged into the Mac using a USB repeater. The projector remote becomes a wireless mouse, for controlling iTunes, and anything else I want to see or hear. Got analog audio cabling for non-AirTunes audio on a different input on my receiver.
You don't really care where the CPU is located, as long as you have a display and input device.
I'd like to dip my balls in that.
1) Get a big ol' pipe full of bandwidth.
2) Load your Mac up with a Terabyte of disk space (I have 4 internal 250GB drives... just cheap drives, they don't need to be fast. Mine were $150 each)
3) Fire up Azureus as your BitTorrent client (make sure to avoid crashes by installing the latest beta, B8 or greater).
4) Purchase the $150 eyeHome from El Gato.
You're all set!
I have about 250GB of music (mostly AACs encoded at 192K, but some MP3s and a rare OGG, ALE or FLAC). I also have about 250GB of video, either DVDs, 3ivx, DivX, and videos with other crazy codecs.
eyeHome connects to my entertainment system with component, composite or svideo cables and optical digital or composite audio cables. It connects to the home network via 10/100BaseT Ethernet (router or crossover cable) or WiFi (Airport Express). The box itself is tiny and light. There's no interface on the box outside of a red power light which turns green when connected. I routinely unplug the unit and take it with me from living room to bedroom, or take it with me on vacation.
It connects using Rendezvous...amazingly fast and easy...it really is easier than most VCR setups.
The audio/video quality is amazing, but that's kinda to be expected because you're sending the actual files to the unit, not some compressed stream. The impact on my Mac isn't noticeable...Activity Monitor shows less than 1% cpu use even when viewing a DVD. Surprisingly, the impact on the network is just as insignificant.
The unit plays:
iPhoto albums and slideshows, or any images in your Pictures directory
Videos in your Movies directory
Music and playlists in iTunes
It also allows you to put aliases in these directories...My Movies directory has an alias to another 250GB drive.
Now with BitTorrent, what I have is like a time-traveling Tivo! If I miss something on Tivo, I just head over to Suprnova.org and download it. Often I can find HDTV versions that are much better quality than the crappy HDTV programming I get from Comcast (who totally over-compresses).
I also have a Formac Studio TVR for recording shows on my Mac. This works pretty well, especially with the scheduling feature.
The eyeHome is only available for Macintosh and OS X. If this was the only thing I used a Macintosh for, it would be well worth the purchase of the Mac...of course I *do* use the Mac for everything else as well since I can't even notice when the eyeHome is in use.