Video Appliance For a Large Library On a Network?

devjj writes "For the past year or so I have been trying (and failing) to figure out a reasonable solution for bringing my large media library to my living room. All of my media lives on an Ubuntu server that sits on my network. It's been very reliable and it's fast enough for streaming purposes. My content is exposed via SMB. It's the living room side where I keep running into problems. I am currently using Windows 7 and XBMC, but the case is too big and noisy, I don't particularly care for Windows, and the whole thing just seems overkill. What I want is a device that can present a decent UI that the non-Slashdot crowd would be able to use, but that is still powerful enough to stream full-fidelity 1080p. I dream of a small box that can transcode video over a network, but that's probably a pipe dream. The new Apple TV would be great if it could connect to network shares. What say you, Slashdot? Is what I'm looking for possible, or should I just give in to the iTunes/Amazon/whatever juggernauts?"

Comments

Re:Mac Mini + Plex

[Firehed]

As a heads-up, I just tried this and ended up having to return the system. There appears to be some bug with their HDMI which can cause the machine to kernel panic, apparently when powering on either the display or receiver it's plugged into*. A damn shame, as it's otherwise very well suited to that kind of use. A compact, quiet, and fairly cool system that doesn't use a whole lot of power but still has no problem playing back HD video. Hooking the tower back up to the TV just sucks, as it uses about 50x the energy** and is massively overkill for that kind of use, and is certainly not compact by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe I'll dig out an old unused laptop instead.

* I'm not 100% sure that's the cause, but it was as close as I ever got to diagnosing the issue. And this was after exchanging the system for a full replacement. If only only happened to one machine I'd blame the hardware, but two systems with identical problems tells me something else is at play. Of course, it could be specific to my TV+receiver combo too.

**Which only bothers me because of the power bill. Effing hippies.