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Ask Slashdot: How To Make My Own Hardware Multimedia Player?

Posted by timothy on from the many-have-tried dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I was looking at multimedia players from brands such as SumVision, Noontec and Western Digital. They all seem to be some device which accepts a USB hard-drive and commands from an IR remote control, and throws the result over HDMI. I have my own idea of what a hardware multimedia player should do (e.g. a personalized library screen for episodes, movies and documentaries; resume play; loudness control; etc.). I also think it will a good programming adventure because I will have to make the player compatible with more than a few popular codecs. Is this an FPGA arena? Or a mini-linux tv-box? Any advice, books or starting point to suggest?" There certainly have been a lot of products and projects in this domain over the years, but what's the best place to start in the year 2012?

5 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. The easy way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    XBMC

    1. Re:The easy way by NFN_NLN · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This story only has 2 comments right now. One recommending XBMC and another recommending RaspberryPi.
      Correct on both counts. I don't think you need to reinvent the wheel on this...

      Also, "USB hard-drive"? Do you really want to transfer media to a drive? Build a home NAS and stream everything to the media player. The media player should be small and quiet. There is no need for an HDD.

    2. Re:The easy way by Keruo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      XBMC

      Combine this with AppleTV, it's only $99, and you have somewhat sane system.
      It comes with remote already so one less extra step to tinker on.

      Your question is about media and entertainment. Are you entertained by tinkering stuff or consuming entertainment generated by others?

      --
      There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
    3. Re:The easy way by grantek · · Score: 5, Informative

      Even with the best of tools and setups, pure streaming is not always an option. My synology NAS barfs on .mp4s sometimes.

      Your NAS doing DLNA is doing more than a NAS needs to. XBMC happily supports connecting to Samba or SFTP shares within the application, or you could just use NFS and attach the NAS share to the local filesystem. If a NAS cares about what type of file it's sending over a plain filesystem access protocol like that it's a broken NAS.

    4. Re:The easy way by PNutts · · Score: 5, Insightful

      DLNA sucks donkey dick.

      Hey, slow down. We're talking about building it, not what we're going to watch on it. But since you brought it up is it available on Blu -ray?