A Cheap and Easy Network Digital Media Player?

hethatishere asks: "Does such a thing exist? Better yet, is it easy enough for my parents to use? PRISMIQ seems to offer a pretty good one, but it has very limited codec support. D-Link also offers a wireless Media player, but it too struggles with the copious number of codecs available. So is there a cheap and affordable Wireless Networked Media Player, that supports most if not all common and advanced codecs (DivX, XviD, and various wrappers like MKV and OGG, etc), or is this still a pipe dream?"

Comments

MediaMVP

[Jjeff1]

I hear the MediaMVP from hauppauge is really nice, especially for 99$ US. A friend of mine has one and streams all his movies from a PC in his house. It does music, video (including divx) and stills. You can skin the interface if you don't like the canned one.
On the downside, it requires you to install software on your PC, which I think is windows only, don't know if there is a OSS server yet for it. Also, if you intend to watch divx movies, you'll need a 1.8 Ghz CPU or better. Apparently the box is some type of VNC client, and the software turns your PC into a VNC server.

Re:MediaMVP

[rusty0101]

There are instructions for how to get it running as a front end for MythTV.

First up is to set up a tftp server on your dhcp server. You might be able to do this with software for a Linksys 54g firewall/router, but you would probably be better off running both on a dedicated server behind your firewall, rather than on it.

On the server you will need to have available the appropriate client image for the MVP to load up. That includes pre-configuring that image with the information on how to connect to your MythTV back end. There are instructions at http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=MediaM VP_LinuxHOWTO for anyone really interested.

Enjoy.

~Rusty

Re:MediaMVP

[enrico_suave]

The mediamvp is pretty cool... I believe there's a lot of MediaMVP linux hacking at SHSpvr forum

It playsback primarily mpeg2 but there are little transcode on the fly utilities that allow it to push divx/etc through it's mpeg2 decoder.

howto use MediaMVP, PVR250, GBPVR make cheap/easy PVR

There are "client" replacments for SageTV and GBPVR that allow you to extend the full functionality of your PC PVR to these little quiet clients over your wired network (a wireless version is in the works... some wireless bridge gateway shennagins are possible depending on the quality of your link/bitrate/quality)

e.

Squeeze Box

[MJArrison]

A Squeeze Box is exactly what you're looking for. I got one a few months ago. It is a god send. Both wired and wireless versions are available. It's a little more expensive than the major brand counterparts that you mentioned, but it is:

• totally open sourced
  
• served with perl
  
• capable of every codec imaginary
  
• capable of digital and analog output
  

I love it!

Re:Squeeze Box

[Khakionion]

capable of every codec imaginary

Damn, I've got to get me some of that.

Re:Squeeze Box

[spacecowboy420]

Looks awesome - except, what about video? I can imagine video codecs, the site doesn't even mention video.

Re:Squeeze Box

[spagetti_code]

I totally agree. I have been down the Netgear MP101 and can I say that the box is a big load of rubbish. It continually skips. Netgear keep releasing patches, and keep saying "on the next release we promise to fix streaming problems" (see here). But they dont (at least not yet).

I tried using their own software - XP based. rubbish. I tried the twonkyvision server. Nope.

There's lots of unhappy MP101 users out there.

Then I bought a squeezebox. What a joy. The server runs on anything (perl). The box is reliable, quick, slick. The boxes can be controlled from the server (turn on, change look etc). The boxes are *really* easy to configure. I have my music on the mythbox which streams it to my stereo and PC. I have squeezeboxen in the bedroom and garage.

My advice - dont waste time with the cheap crap. The extra few dollars for a squeezebox is worth it .

xbox of course!

[sycotic]

I'm not so sure it is the cheapest solution, but it sure is the most flexible!

An xbox coupled with xbmc (xbox media center) is the shizznizzle!

URL: http://www.xboxmediacenter.de/

(I just _know_ that any geek thats used xbmc will concur)

Re:xbox of course!

[Jherico]

I concur. The XMBC app plays just about everything I throw at it, with the exception of some of the newer QuickTime codecs. The only downside I've had is that the XBox isn't powerful enough to render anything higher than 720p and sometimes not even that. I've got a number of movies that are encoded in HD and the XBox will sometimes stutter while rendering them during action scenes or if there's too much motion on the screen. You can also set up XBMC to play itunes media streamed from an itunes server somewhere on the net.

DLINK DSM320

[szyzyg]

Is a PoS 90% of users won't get much use from it.... but as a hacker I've got it doing exactly what I want - it's a linux system so it's possible to get your own apps onto the firmware and customize it in ways that Dlink never intended.
It does have a lot of things going for it
1) Ogg/Vorbis support - as an early contributer I'm happy to play my ogg collect - but the metadata support sucks
2) XviD support - again, my codec of choice for video.... except that it has a lot of sync problems and drops a lot of frames/freezes up randomly.
3) Wireless G by default - 802.11b is nmo good for video.
4) Every connector on the backplane you'd ever need.

It's frustrating, since I can dig around I can see how easy it would be to make this thing absolutely rock, but dlink just isn't supporting it. This may be because it's a repackaged Redsonic player....

Anyway... time to get imeem running on this creature ;-)

Re:DLINK DSM320

[Jim Robinson Jr.]

While I agree the the DSM320 is not-yet-ready-for-prime-time (yes... I own one) I *can* tell you that it's not terrible either. It plays music well, has both analog and digital outputs, and supports (pay special attention to my word choice) VOB files, so theoretically I can rip DVD's to my PC and serve them up across the network. Your observations about sync problems, lockups, etc., are correct. However I think the problem is at the server rather than the remote unit. Because the DSM320 feeds from a UPnP server it does NOT require the DLINK software. In fact, any UPnP server will do.

I'm still testing this myself, so please don't consider this an endorsement, but TwonkyVision (http://www.twonkyvision.com/) makes a UPnP server that runs on Windows, Linux or MAC and supports a huge range of files and formats, including support for music (MP3, WMA, WAV, LPCM), photos (GIF, JPEG) and videos (MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI, WMV, VOB).

Since you are interested mainly in music, you'll be pleased to know that they have a free version that only plays music.

Worth a shot!

Jim

VLC

[Leroy_Brown242]

http://www.videolan.org/

Cheap, Really Easy, But not Networked.

[pretentiousPPC]

I just bought this DVD player at Amazon, and I'm really happy with it.

It plays nearly everything; DVDs, CDs, DIVX, XVID, MP3s, Don't think it plays Ogg though. All you need to do is burn it to some CD-R or DVD+-R and put it in, just like a regular DVD.

No need try to teach someone the intricacy of a networked home theater system, that's still more of a geek project right now, and costly to boot. Far easier it is to just burn it and tell your wife/mother to put in the DVD player.

I used to have to s-video to my TV in through my laptop for all the times my wife missed her Survivor. A thing she would always need my help to do. Now I can just burn the show to a CD, and I don't have to be there to deal with it. It's Great!