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:1/10 sorry.

[antifoidulus]

You fail it. Tell me, what os ship out of the box with ifs? If you guessed everything but windows you would be correct. If you asked, what os has a security model so broken it gets hacked constantly? If you guessed windows you would be correct. If you asked, what osgoes out of its way to limit the things I can do on my computer without forking over large amounts of money? If you guessed windows you would right. If you asked, which operating system is still so primitive it is unable to distinguish the physical layout of storage vs the logical layout of storage? If you guessed windows you would be right. If you asked, which operating system sets firewall policies in at least 3 different locations which interact with each other in incredibly complex ways instead of having a central easy to modify place for your firewall settings? If you guessed windows you would be right. If you asked, which os doesn't come out of the box with basic tools such as ssh? If you guessed windows you would be right.
. If you asked which operating system demands you phone home to your corporate overlords each time you add hardware you would be right if you said windows. I could go on but I will address your other points. Os x has an incredibly powerful unix underpinning and a very easy way to manage applications with said underpinning. Windows command line is a joke. Windows machines are so primitive that they refuse to connect to the domain controller you specify if they broadcast and see another domain. In my years of doing os x and Linux admin I have never seen anything so profoundly stupid. Also you boast about how much easier windows is, have you ever tried to connect it to a non windows box? It's a huge pain in the ass. In fact pretty much doing anything on windows is a pain in the asss and takes about 10x as long as it does on a mac. Every time i use redmonds toy i just feel badfor the people that thonk that computing has to be that difficult. Have you ever scrutinized microsofts claims about windows? People whose real OSs have had those features for at least half a decade before Microsoft was even competent enough to copy them, and even then it didn't do it right. Pretty much every feature of windows 7 was in tiger which was released in 2004. Windows is nothing but a toy to people who actually know anything about computers.