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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.?"
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.
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.
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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.
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.