Ask Slashdot: Suggestions For a Simple Media Server?

rueger writes "We live and breathe Netflix, but sometimes want to watch programs downloaded from the 'net. I've been carrying them downstairs on a USB stick, but would prefer to run a small media server on my Mint Linux box. As usual, I thought this would be simple. Install a package on my PC, and use our Netgear NeoTV Max box to play stuff off of the server. Plex was highly recommended, and installed easily, but will see some .mkv files, but not others, for no obvious reason. The one file that does show up plays fine, except that subtitles don't work. And it completely refuses to see the partition full of music. A quick tour of the Plex forums suggests that making this work would take more hours than I'm prepared to spend. Serviio looked good too, and 'sees' my music, and sees the movie folders that Plex couldn't, but won't show the actual .mkv files. And again, it looks like configuring the thing could consume half of my life. So I'm asking: is there a fairly simple, works-right-out-of-the-box, fairly resource friendly media server that will just allow me to play movies that I download without a lot of headaches? (One obvious issue is that movies and TV shows downloaded can be in a any of a dozen formats. I'd love it if the server dealt with that. I'm also open to suggestions for a Roku style box that does Netflix well, but which will also play nicely with a media server. And if any or all of these things can also let me play streaming video off the web (like BBC iPlayer content), I'll be in heaven.)"

Comments

UMS

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Universal Media Server on OS X, which is available for Windows, OS X and Linux. It works well with our WD HD TV Live and various Samsung TV and DVR devices. But the first thing to do would probably be to get the Netgear device the boot.

Re: UMS

[Anonymous Coward]

I use plain old SMB, and an mk808b. I use mxplayer on Android, and mount the networkshare using cifsmanager.
It all works (mostly).
I believe a later iteration of the Android tv stick should be able to handle hi Def with no problem (mk808 b struggles with 1080p, can handle 720p)

Re: UMS

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh, unless you're running SMBv3 on Windows 2012, forget SMB/CIFS for streaming stuff across a network. Sure it can work, but it can be choppy as hell too. Maybe NFS, but uPNP/DLNA is designed for the task.

Re:UMS

[shokk]

I use this all the time and it’s a great solution using a 6 year old “server” grade computer and CentOS Linux.

Re: UMS

[P-niiice]

SMB streams 1080P stuff fine across my network, as long as I'm close to the router. 720P is damn good anywhere in the house. Been doing it for a long time, most lately on my Nexus 7 and my GBox MX2.

Re: UMS

[MickyTheIdiot]

That's funny. As long as my network conditions are good I've never had a problem like this with SMB, and I've had a setup for years.

Re: UMS

[Anonymous Coward]

My Win2k3 server has no problem slinging 1080P across the network, even when there's substantial other traffic going on. Have plain old SMB shares providing the back-end storage, with a MySQL instance for the library. Front-end is controlled by XBMC and supplied to screens via a couple of Acer Revos - small, low-power and quiet.

I've gone the Windows route as that's what I typically work with, but there's none of the components above that couldn't be replicated under Freeware/Open-source.

Re: UMS

[Anonymous Coward]

This. I'm surprised that anyone would even ask such as silly question. It's like they don't know what a network share is.

Re: UMS

[Anonymous Coward]

DLNA, lol. Got any other worthless technologies of the week to advertise?

Re: UMS

[ZokelX]

Samba here too, share from linux or windows, every file is visible, transcoding is useless since even 3 year old phones run 1080p natively. You can still do some file manipulation from a tablet/laptop/phone to fix subs for example. You can delete stuff you watched. You have __security__ unlike UPNP/DLNA mediaservers where everybody you give access to your wifi or LAN gets to see all your media. 1080p on Mplayer with android tablet/phone runs like a charm on wifi with lightweight concrete walls and approx 5-10 meters distance in between.

Re: UMS

[nabsltd]

Even from Blu-Ray, HD content is at most 50Mbps. Windows in any version (or any modern OS) has no issue delivering that speed from the disk to the network hardware.

At that point, it's entirely a hardware issue (cable quality, WiFi speed, etc.). And, for real-world bit rates of less than 10Mbps, you can use some pretty bad hardware and still have no issues.

Maybe NFS, but uPNP/DLNA is designed for the task.

DLNA is perhaps the worst method of delivery, as it's entirely dependent on the client and server software being able to negotiate the right format to use for the audio and video. Even with success at that point, the negotiation of the container to allow subtitles, chapter marks (including names), alternate audio, overlay video, etc., is where DLNA completely sucks.

Re: UMS

[isorox]

SMB streams 1080P stuff fine across my network, as long as I'm close to the router. 720P is damn good anywhere in the house. Been doing it for a long time, most lately on my Nexus 7 and my GBox MX2.

Why would the resolution make any difference to how well it streams? A 2mbit 1080p stream will work fine, a 270mbit 576i stream wont

Re: UMS

[isorox]

That's funny. As long as my network conditions are good I've never had a problem like this with SMB, and I've had a setup for years.

SMB used to (not sure if it still does) have issues with high latency. I think you could only get something like 256kbit per round trip time, so a 10ms latency would limit you to 25mbit.

I assume that it's been fixed now.

Re: UMS

[P-niiice]

because my router sucks, and with more walls between me and the router, by bandwidth drops severely.

Re: UMS

[godefroi]

Ugh, unless you're on a gbit wired connection, why bother? Sure, wireless can work, but it can be shit too.

Oh, you forgot to wire jacks in your house? That's a problem.

Re: UMS

[isorox]

because my router sucks, and with more walls between me and the router, by bandwidth drops severely.

You talking about a video router? Blackmagiv do perfectly serviceable ones for about £1500 that do 3G let alone 1080i.

That's the only place i can see resolution being an issue for routers.

Now if you're complaining about latency, jitter and bandwidth in an file based up world, then you'll be looking at the video bandwidth being the issue, as file system and client buffeting will cope with pretty much any amount of jitter.

Re: UMS

[Kielistic]

Because most people wouldn't encode their 1080p files to carry less visual information than their 720p files and so: higher resolution requires a higher bitrate. Stop being obtuse.

Re: UMS

[TsuruchiBrian]

So if most people would encode their 1080p videos at a higher bitrate than their 720p files (debatable), then you somehow conclude that 1080p files found on the internet will always be higher bitrate than 720p files?

A higher resolution does not require a higher bitrate. You could say that a higher resolution requires a higher bitrate to maintain the same level of quality. There is, however, a wide range of qualities of video found on the internet.

Stop calling other people obtuse

Re: UMS

[TsuruchiBrian]

Ugh, unless you're running SMBv3 on Windows 2012, forget SMB/CIFS for streaming stuff across a network. Sure it can work, but it can be choppy as hell too. Maybe NFS, but uPNP/DLNA is designed for the task.

I am currently using samba/cifs for my NAS and I get 60 MB/s transfers.

I have had lots of problems in the past with NFS and transferring large files.

Re: UMS

[Kielistic]

I never said it required a higher bitrate but do you know of anybody that builds their media library to have their 1080p files be lower quality than their 720p? That sounds rather foolish to me.

A 1080p file produces more pixels than a 720p file and therefore to maintain the same level of quality a 1080p file will require more bits and hence a higher bitrate.

Re: UMS

[sjames]

I use NFS all the time for video. Old laptop connected to TV NFS mounts my workstation (where work stops).

Re: UMS

[TsuruchiBrian]

I never said it required a higher bitrate

You literally said:

higher resolution requires a higher bitrate

do you know of anybody that builds their media library to have their 1080p files be lower quality than their 720p?

I do not know anybody who does this intentionally, but most people I know do not encode their own videos. If they get their videos from many different sources that have different standards of quality, it is likely that they will have some videos that are both higher resolution and lower bitrate than other videos in their collection.

Furthermore, you are assuming that all these files are encoded with the same compression algorithm. Some compression algorithms have better performance. It is very possible for a 1080p video that is encoded with an efficient algorithm (e.g. h264) to be both better quality and lower bitrate than that same video encoded at 720p with a lower performing algorithm (e.g. cinepak)

The point is that the the ability to stream a video is directly dependent on the bitrate of the video. The fact that higher resolution videos tend to have a higher bitrate is just a correlation.

Re: UMS

[isorox]

I never said it required a higher bitrate

You literally said:

higher resolution requires a higher bitrate

do you know of anybody that builds their media library to have their 1080p files be lower quality than their 720p?

I do not know anybody who does this intentionally, but most people I know do not encode their own videos. If they get their videos from many different sources that have different standards of quality, it is likely that they will have some videos that are both higher resolution and lower bitrate than other videos in their collection.

Furthermore, you are assuming that all these files are encoded with the same compression algorithm. Some compression algorithms have better performance. It is very possible for a 1080p video that is encoded with an efficient algorithm (e.g. h264) to be both better quality and lower bitrate than that same video encoded at 720p with a lower performing algorithm (e.g. cinepak)

The point is that the the ability to stream a video is directly dependent on the bitrate of the video. The fact that higher resolution videos tend to have a higher bitrate is just a correlation.

Absolutely.

I do encode my own videos (well my colleagues videos), professionally. they are watched by literally millions of people literally every day. I aim for a constant quality, not a constant bitrate. Most items I encode at a given subjective quality will add about 50% to encode at 1440x1080 25i over 576x768 25i, however I've encoded some low light stuff in SD that's hit a peak bitrate of 45mbit for a given quality on a given h264 video stream. The 3 minute piece came in at an average 25mbit.

That was originally off a DV25 piece.

Recently, 5 minutes of glorious looking pictures of floods, with a lot of running water, waving reeds, etc; rather than a typical 4-8mbit over 3-4 minutes depending on the clip, this stuff came in at 18mbit. It was well lit, but had a lot of detail and a lot of motion. The piece is a brilliant test, far better than people skipping through a forest.

Now encoding something simple like south park will use a lot less bits for a given quality.

So for the same subjective quality and same resolution you can have a bitrate varying by an order of magnitude at the same resolution. Even if bitrate scaled linearly with resolution you'd still have a minute of some SD material taking more bits to encode than a minute of other HD material.

I haven't run any tests, but my gut would tell me that something cartoonish like southpark at 1080p60 will use a lot fewer bits per second than encoding Blue Planet at 480i or 576i -- for starters I think southpark is only 15fps, so you're only really encoding 1080p15 (given the inter-frame changes on each frame will be zero).

Re: UMS

[Anonymous Coward]

The original intent was understood by the poster who replied. This is simply being a pedantic douche. Stop being a Sheldon.

Re: UMS

[Kielistic]

Yes- we're all aware of what you just said. What everyone else seems to see except you, however, is that you are being obnoxiously obtuse. Resolution and bitrate are more than "just" correlated. It is causative. All other things being equal higher resolution requires higher bitrate. This means that in the vast majority of useful cases higher resolution will need a higher bitrate.

Let me break this down into a car analogy for you. This is what you did:

Accelerating a car to a faster velocity requires more energy.

No it doesn't! A race car can accelerate to 250kmph going down a hill using less energy than an Astro van to get to 150kmph going up a hill! Herp derp!

Re: UMS

[TsuruchiBrian]

What everyone else seems to see except you,

Now you speak for everyone?

Resolution and bitrate are more than "just" correlated.

The fact that you said this, makes me think you don't know what "correlation" means.

It is causative.

You also don't know what "causative" means.

This means that in the vast majority of useful cases higher resolution will need a higher bitrate.

You don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

Let me break this down into a car analogy for you. This is what you did:

Accelerating a car to a faster velocity requires more energy.

No it doesn't! A race car can accelerate to 250kmph going down a hill using less energy than an Astro van to get to 150kmph going up a hill! Herp derp!

You also don't know shit about physics.

A car going a certain velocity has the same kinetic energy whether this energy was converted from chemical energy in a fuel or from potential energy of going down a hill.

A better example is this:

You say "A car that is going faster has more energy." I say actually the mass of the car also matters as it's kinetic energy is equal to 0.5*m*v^2". You say "Stop being obtuse", "everyone agrees with me", "I can never admit when I am wrong or when someone else is right", "Herp derp, I'm a fucking idiot"

Re: UMS

[Anonymous Coward]

Herp derp! Nerd fights are the lamest shit evar.

Re: UMS

[iamhassi]

You don't speak for everyone. Since Plex is transcoding the video Plex can be set to make the streaming a certain bitrate no matter the resolution, so I get 2mbps no matter if it's 720 or 1080.

Re: UMS

[Kielistic]

That's why I said "accelerating a car to a faster velocity requires more energy" and never "has more energy". You completely proved my point and it flew over your head entirely. A vehicle with better aerodynamics and less weight will require less energy to accelerate than a heavier one with worse aerodynamics.

A higher resolution causes a higher bitrate (this is why it is causative). There are other factors that can lower the bitrate. Things like less visual information will require a lower bitrate. A more efficient encoding will also require a lower bit rate. But when everything else is the same for a video file if you increase the resolution you will increase the bitrate. Do you know what causative means? It really seems that you don't.

You say ... "I can never admit when I am wrong or when someone else is right", "Herp derp, I'm a fucking idiot"

Pot meet kettle?

Re: UMS

[TsuruchiBrian]

A higher resolution causes a higher bitrate (this is why it is causative).

A person selecting the bitrate they encode a video with causes the bitrate to be whatever is selected.

People usually (but not always) select higher bitrates for higher resolution videos, which results in a CORRELATION between resolution and bitrate.

But when everything else is the same for a video file if you increase the resolution you will increase the bitrate.

Have you ever encoded a video? You can select whatever bitrate you want and it is independent of the resolution

Re: UMS

[Kielistic]

It can only lower the bitrate while increasing the resolution by removing visual information! Are you daft? It's math not magic.

Have you ever encoded a video? No one is ever going to recommend you to use the same bitrate to encode a video to 1080P as they would to 720P.

Sure people don't always use a higher bitrate but if they don't it is almost always not the right choice. If they are aiming for a lower filesize they should just go with a lower resolution because making a high resolution with the bitrate too low will cause it to look terrible!

You are still wrong about it being correlated. More visual information requires more data there is no way around that. There are many factors that contribute to bitrate and resolution but when you account for the differences it is straight causation. I will repeat: math not magic.

Re: UMS

[TsuruchiBrian]

It can only lower the bitrate while increasing the resolution by removing visual information! Are you daft? It's math not magic.

Have you ever encoded a video? No one is ever going to recommend you to use the same bitrate to encode a video to 1080P as they would to 720P.

Hundreds if not thousands

No one is ever going to recommend you to use the same bitrate to encode a video to 1080P as they would to 720P.

Have you actually ever tried this? If you did, you would find that under most circumstances, The quality will only be a little lower for the 1080p video. That's because, even though there is a lot of visual information removed from the 1080p video, the 720p video started with less visual information, and they end up around the same quality. There is some additional overhead in a 1080p video over a 720p video (e.g. more macroblocks), but this is what causes the 1080p video to be slightly worse quality)

And this is assuming that you are using a bitrate that is more suitable to 720p over 1080p (for this particular video). If you used a bitrate that was more suitable to 1080p, and you encoded the 720 version at this same bitrate will the 720p video always be higher quality because it is lower resolution? Obviously not, because if this were true every one would encode at super high bitrate at low resolution. There is diminishing returns when increasing bitrate, depending on the source video.

Sure people don't always use a higher bitrate but if they don't it is almost always not the right choice. If they are aiming for a lower filesize they should just go with a lower resolution because making a high resolution with the bitrate too low will cause it to look terrible!

This was my whole point to begin with. I said that your streaming capacity is related to the bitrate. This accounts for all videos rather than only the videos where the people encoding it made good choices (which is actually a minority of people). And no it doesn;t look terrible. It just looks a little worse than it could if it was done correctly, which is why people get away with it.

You are still wrong about it being correlated. More visual information requires more data there is no way around that. There are many factors that contribute to bitrate and resolution but when you account for the differences it is straight causation. I will repeat: math not magic.

So by your own logic, 2 videos with the same bitrate, a 720p and a 1080p, have the same visual information, so why would one look like crap?

Have you ever resized an image to be a higher resolution (up sampling), and then zoomed into the original to make them the same visual size? They look about the same quality, and they end up being about the same number of bits (if they are compressed). This is because the amount visual information is about the same.

I will reiterate that you don't know what correlation means. The term correlation describes exactly this kind of scenario, where it is not just a coincidence that higher resolution videos are higher bitrate, but it is not the direct cause.

You are right that it's math and not magic. The problem is that you don't know how that math works. You seem to think you do. But you don't.

Re: UMS

[tsapi]

I am currently using samba/cifs for my NAS and I get 60 MB/s transfers.

I have had lots of problems in the past with NFS and transferring large files.

I am using NFS for years and I saturate my gigabit network..

Re: UMS

[TsuruchiBrian]

Reading or writing? And how big are the files you are accessing?

Re: UMS

[Kielistic]

You keep telling me I don't understand things while continuously proving that it is you that does not. I'll try to lay things out as simply as possible for you.

even though there is a lot of visual information removed from the 1080p video, the 720p video started with less visual information, and they end up around the same quality.

Here you seem confused. You are basically agreeing with me- you just worded it very poorly. You are stating that reducing the bitrate of a 1080p video will remove visual information (which results in loss of quality) whereas a 720p video has less visual information and therefore does not need as high of a bitrate.

So by your own logic, 2 videos with the same bitrate, a 720p and a 1080p, have the same visual information, so why would one look like crap?

This is the crux of the issue. They don't have the same visual information. The 1080 resolution is a bigger space to fill (it has more pixels remember?) If you down scale that to 720 you can get away with reducing the bitrate because you are removing information by downscaling. If you keep it at 1080 you will want a higher bitrate than you would at 720.

When someone says "I want 1080p" they do not mean they want to see what looks like a 640×360 video upresed to 1920x1080. They want to see a crisp "HD" picture.

I don't even know why you are trying to disagree. It's just common sense that higher res will normally require a higher bitrate. Shall we see what youtube has to say on the subject? Citation! What do we notice here? As resolution goes up so does bitrate!

Re: UMS

[TsuruchiBrian]

This is the crux of the issue. They don't have the same visual information. The 1080 resolution is a bigger space to fill (it has more pixels remember?) If you down scale that to 720 you can get away with reducing the bitrate because you are removing information by downscaling. If you keep it at 1080 you will want a higher bitrate than you would at 720.

This is the crux of the issue, and you seem to be thinking that the same amount of information goes into each pixel. This is true for lossless encoding (which is completely impractical for 1080p video), and not true for lossy video encoding (which included compression algorithms like h.264 and vp8).

The "citation" you provides a policy on minimum, maximum and recommended bitrates for various resolutions. This is not a statement of fact about all videos, but guidelines used by youtube.

But if we ignore that for a second, it actually is evidence towards what I am saying, Notice how the maximum 720 bitrate (4000 kbps) is higher than the minimum 1080p bitrate (3000 kbps).

Even the chart you provided clearly shows that you can have higher bitrate videos at lower resolution, and vice versa

I really don't know why you can't just admit you are wrong. If it's because I made fun of you and called you names, then fine, that was a bit childish of me, but it was in response to your arrogant attitude despite clearly being misinformed.

When someone says "I want 1080p" they do not mean they want to see what looks like a 640×360 video upresed to 1920x1080. They want to see a crisp "HD" picture.

This was illustrating a point, not saying that anybody should do this in practice.

It was an experiment you could do

A 720p video has 921600 pixels. A 1080p video has 2073600 pixels just over twice as many as a 720p video.

Take a 720p video source and encode it at the google recommended bitrate of 2500kpbs. Then take that same source, upscale it to 1080p and encode it at 2500kpbs.

According to you the video should look more than twice as bad because the same amount of data needs to be split among more than twice as many pixels. If you actually did it though, you'd find that it does not look significantly worse if you use a good lossy compression algorithm like h.264. If you used no compression at all, then there would be less than have the data in each pixel and it would look bad.

Another way to put it is that video typically has a lot of redundant information. In video compression lingo this is referred to as spatial redundancy and temporal redundancy. When you compress information you are removing redundant information. When you are performing lossy compression, you can remove information that is "almost redundant", and the quality of the video will be based on your threshold of what you consider "almost redundant".

Some video has lots of redundant information (e.g. south park episodes), and some video has less redundant information (like an action movie) The resolution of the video determines an upperbound for the amount of information a video can contain, but this does not mean that higher resolution videos have more information, just that they *can* and *usually* do have more information. But as I said this is a correlation. The higher resolution doesn't *cause* the video to have more non-redundant information. This is only true of uncompressed video.

Re: UMS

[Gondola]

> DLNA is perhaps the worst method of delivery

Absolutely. I have literally tried 7 different DLNA boxes and *none* of them were able to fast forward and rewind properly.

Re: UMS

[tsapi]

Reading or writing? And how big are the files you are accessing?

Both reading and writing (between computers with raid arrays). I measured the throughput with big media files actually (>500mb).

Re: UMS

[TsuruchiBrian]

Well I don't know what to say. I know the source of the problem with NFS and large files is in vxworks. I also have this problem in Linux, but I think it's for a different reason. Lots of people on the internet have similar problems, but the answers tend to be "I used a different OS (on client or server) and it started working, I don't know what exactly fixed it".

Maybe A newer version of the NFS client/server, or a better default setting fixes this issue, but I haven;t been able to figure out what it was.

At least in vxworks the problem was that the nfs server was reopening the file on each packet, and seeking to the beginning of the file to open it, and then seeking to the end of the file to continue the read/write. For small files this seek delay was usually small. On very large files, the nfs server would spend all it's time seeking and throughput would slow to a crawl. Sadly knowing this key piece of information doesn't help me. Maybe I'll just try again one day with a brand new linux OS and it will magically be working.

Re: UMS

[Anonymous Coward]

is the GBox MX2. decent -- (& does it do wireless connection or only hard-wired). Specs look great. You impressed or ??

Raspberry PI

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

I'd suggest to master something from Raspberry PI or alternative. It's cheap and versatile solution

Re:Raspberry PI

[Anonymous Coward]

An even cheaper solution is to use the stuff he already has that is quite capable.

Re:Raspberry PI

[fostware]

Someone has a new hammer and every problem is looking like nail...

Re:Raspberry PI

[wonkey_monkey]

Ah, very helpful. Use a computer. I bet he never thought of that.

Re:Raspberry PI

[StripedCow]

Someone has a new hammer and every problem is looking like nail...

Come on, it's 2014: media streaming is not a "problem" anymore.

Re:Raspberry PI

[Anonymous Coward]

...Until you add up the energy costs for a few years of running a desktop computer vs. a Pi...

Re:Raspberry PI

[camperdave]

...Until you add up the energy costs for a few years of running a desktop computer vs. a Pi...

... which is irrelevant since he'd still be running the old hardware anyway, but now with a Raspberry on top of it.

Re:Raspberry PI

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, he probably wouldn't have a computer on otherwise. Definitely need something dedicated for something as complex as a file server.

Re:Raspberry PI

[kry73n]

A Raspberry PI sucks so bad at I/O, it's not even funny. But that's totally okay for a device that was made for tinkering with GPIO and stuff for educational purposes. Please go the the alternatives! There are many, a bit more costly, that are worth every penny since they deliver orders of magnitude better experience for streaming/networking/ and other HTPC stuff.

Re:Raspberry PI

[jythie]

Well, the OP seems to be having a problem with it. Media streaming is kinda in an in between point right now, lots of solutions for people who like to tinker, and some good solutions for people who just want to pay for a centrally administered service. The stuff in between however is rather spotty and while every project and company likes to claim how easy and effective their solution is, sorting through the claims and finding one that gets the specific use case done with minimal hassle is non trivial.

Re:Raspberry PI

[Anonymous Coward]

Xbian on Raspberry Pi is the way to go. It boots to XBMC with full networking support.

Re:Raspberry PI

[neokushan]

In fairness, I use a Raspberry Pi myself however I use it as an XBMC machine plugged into my TV, rather than the media server. I let it access the files directly, via an NFS share and it works incredibly well. It can also use SMB if you're a windows user (and in fact, I'm running a Windows server, but since it has NFS support and that has a lower overhead, that's what I use), as well as various other protocols - and there's a plex plugin for it.

The OP isn't prepared to put some arbitrary hours in to getting his current setup working and if he values his time, dropping $35 on a PI seems like a reasonable option to me as it can be setup in just a few mins. It's literally a case of sticking the RaspBMC image onto an SD card, plugging it in and when XBMC boots, telling it which paths to scan for media.

They're cool little devices to have anyway and using XBMC on it means he doesn't have to run anything special on his existing Linux box.

Re:Raspberry PI

[nullchar]

The Raspberry Pi cannot play all of the formats the OP desires. For example, it cannot play large AVIs streamed over SMB, only certain formats the hardware can handle.

Re:Raspberry PI

[berashith]

also consider that every simple, cheap, and easy solution may work great right now, but just wait two weeks until another codec or spec gets released. keeping up is a giant pain

Re:Raspberry PI

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a Rasberry Pi, with the XBMC spin on it. USB wireless makes accessing other media contains rather trivial.

Stick a 2 gig USB drive on it, install BitTorrent sync? and you have local storage for all of your media, and instant backups to that from any device with the Bittorrent sync client installed on it.

It just works for everything I've run across yet except Netflix, but I get that natively from both my internet TV, or the Xbox.

Re:Raspberry PI

[trendzetter]

Didn't experience any such problems. I am playing large avi over smb all the time.

Re:Raspberry PI

[jedidiah]

My aging MythTV setup seems to do well enough. It's not exactly "cheap" though. It requires real PCs as clients. They are not hefty boxes, but they at least have enough muscle to handle the things you are likely to see.

A real PC with the client software of your choice is a far better option than trying to shoehorn this onto some weak ass ARM appliance or some random bit of AV kit with DLNA support.

Plex is not a bad starting point but it has it's own quirks (as the OP has discovered).

A proper copy of XBMC is probably what this guy needs.

Re:Raspberry PI

[jedidiah]

> Ah, very helpful. Use a computer. I bet he never thought of that.

Since he's trying to use Plex, that's actually a very good guess.

That didn't work out so well. So building a proper CLIENT box is probably the next logical step.. Once he does that, the "server" side of things can be ridiculously trivial.

Any old PC with a big disk shared over CIFS would do.

Re:Raspberry PI

[rikkards]

My biggest complaint is the grey screen issue if you skip . Only issues I playing files otherwise is it stutters on a literal 1080p rip of blu-ray.

Re:Raspberry PI

[neokushan]

Large AVI's are no problem for me. Again, he's using Linux Mint on his (presumably?) server, so using NFS shouldn't be an issue if the overhead for SMB proves too much.

Re:Raspberry PI

[mrclisdue]

A proper copy of XBMC is probably what this guy needs.

+1

xbmc *is* all he needs. It'll do samba, sftp, nfs, upnp (ymmv, but at least one of those will work out of the box, smb/upnp)

cheers,

Re:Raspberry PI

[neokushan]

I haven't encountered a grey screen issue, is there a specific occurrence for that? Skipping generally works fine for me, sometimes it does that thing where it seems to miss a keyframe and it looks a bit funky for a few seconds but aside from that, it works fairly well.

Re:Raspberry PI

[CppDeveloper]

I bought two Raspberry Pi's a few weeks ago and set one up using the OpenELEC distro for XBMC and it works very well streaming HD video over my wired network using samba shares off of my ASUS N-66RT and other computer shares. Once my cases get here I will be trying to set the other one to output using the composite video. Using the android remote app (over wireless network) to control it has a perceptible lag on the menu but works well and is just fast enough that it is not annoying.

Re:Raspberry PI

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 for Rasberry PI/NFS.

NFS is easy, supported native in XBMC and super easy to deal with (no permission issues, etc).
I just export the media directories RO .

The Pi is cheap, works well and no vendor lockin.

Re:Raspberry PI

[isorox]

Someone has a new hammer and every problem is looking like nail...

I tried using my pi as a nail. It was about as good as using it as leaving it as a remote box I can ssh off.

Re:Raspberry PI

[danomac]

No kidding. Set up a file server with NFS and use an Intel NUC at the TV installed with xbmc (and/or mythtv.) Intel themselves has instructions for setting up their NUC with xbmc using Linux Mint. The newer NUCs even have an IR receiver built in so all you need is a MCE remote (or a Harmony) and you're set.

Re:Raspberry PI

[kry73n]

Maybe that works with a single client when the Pi does nothing else at that time.

Re:Raspberry PI

[CppDeveloper]

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I was using the Pi as the client/player not as a media server. It probably would suck as a server since the storage would have to be through USB 2.0.

Re:Raspberry PI

[doconnor]

The Raspberry PI is both very small and very cheap while maintaining the flexibility of a desktop computer makes it an exceptionally versatile device.

Re:Raspberry PI

[Captain Sarcastic]

Someone has a new hammer and every problem is looking like nail...

And then they discover the screwdriver, and declare the hammer to be obsolete.

Re: Raspberry PI

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used a RPi for a while and am looking for a better solution. You need to transcode to to a lower bit rate otherwise it stutters during action scenes.

Re:Raspberry PI

[khellendros1984]

I think I'd rather use the Pi for one thing at a time, anyhow; it's not well-suited to be a box providing a bunch of services at once if any of those services involve high data throughput or heavy data processing (like video playback would).

The things are cheap enough that you can buy several for the price that you might pay for a single, more powerful computer.

Re:Raspberry PI

[thegarbz]

Or maybe someone has a nail (op) and he's simply deciding on what hammer to get.

What's the aversion? $30, a prebuilt OS (raspbmc) and the op has effectively avoided the massive headache which is getting DNLA or some equivalent streaming format working. The pi is a great little media player which I use to play content stored on a Nas, and I have yet to find a case where it won't play something.

Re:Raspberry PI

[rikkards]

That's what I am talking about. Essentially from what I gleaned is the skip doesn't get the full data frame it only starts with the data at that specific second so until the screen changes enough or the next frame refresh you will only see the changes.

Note: terminology is probably wrong but you get my gist.

Re:Raspberry PI

[KingMotley]

From my understanding, the Pi can only play h.264 (if licensed), and MPEG 2 (if licensed). Any other codec and it pretty much dies because the processor isn't capable of decoding the stream fast enough. h.264 and MPEG 2 only work because it is done in hardware.

MiniDLNA

[ImperialXT]

I had a brief look on the product page and couldn't find a clear answer if it supports DLNA or not, but it should do. So maybe look at something nice and simple such as MiniDLNA which was recently renamed to ReadyMedia apparently.

Re:MiniDLNA

[ch0rlt0n]

I have MiniDLNA running on a raspberry pi with 1TB self powered usb disk attached. This is connected directly to the router in a cupboard under the stairs.

Then use an XBox 360 or PS3 as the client connected to the TV.

I do have similar issues with mkv files which the server sometimes sees and "advertises" and sometimes doesn't (i'm guessing based on file exension?) and which the XBox sometimes can decode and sometimes can't (based on enciding?). I haven't determined exactly what the cases are for when it works and when it doesn't.

I am not doing any transcoding on the server but I'd consider it to be a system that works well.

Re: MiniDLNA

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried browsing 10.00 tunes, series episodes and flicks on DLNA? I like DLNA for small collections, but for larger sets folder-based browsing is indispensable IMO.

A happy Mythtv, XBMC user.

Re:MiniDLNA

[ch0rlt0n]

worth mentioning that it also shares >14000 tracks of music plus photos as separate "shares". Music can be browsed and searched easily using Banshee from Linux laptop and WMP11 on work laptop.

Re: MiniDLNA

[Anonymous Coward]

I second the suggestion of MiniDLNA, it's very light-weight.

I'm sure DLNA supports folder based browsing, because that's exactly how I use it with MiniDLNA (with ~3TB of video). The biggest issues I've had is that it doesn't pickup changes on a unionfs'ed directory, but that is more likely to be an issue with unionfs and MiniDLNA.

Re:MiniDLNA

[gbjbaanb]

an alternative is Fuppes, from sourceforge, it is a simple DLNA server that works very well. The only disadvantage I have with it is that it doesn't prevent Windows from sleeping when its streaming (I have Windows set to sleep after an hour of inactivity so halfway through a 2-hour movie, I'd have to nudge the mouse) which is a pretty major problem.

It looks like a dead project but the author said it wasn't, but I still couldn't build it, even on its native Linux platform. Still, if you run it on Linux or have different power settings, it works.

Re:miniDLNA

[Anonymous Coward]

I also have minidlna on an old HP laptop with Arch linux. It doesn't do any decoding though so the receiving end (in my case a Samsung tv) should be able to play the files wanted. I've had little trouble with it so far, unlike with Serviio on Windows. The Serviio service needed to be restarted as admin user everytime the laptop would wake from suspend.

The naming seems to be a bit confusing:

on GitHub: MiniDLNA (aka ReadyDLNA), https://github.com/azatoth/minidlna
on Sourceforge: ReadyMedia (formerly known as MiniDLNA), http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/

so it's minidlna, readydlna or readymedia. Go figure.

Re: MiniDLNA

[Anonymous Coward]

2nd on minidlna. I run that on freebsd, also apache for http access and samba.

Re:MiniDLNA

[nightsky30]

mkv files are containers. They may contain many types of codecs within. I think you are right, and the XBox must not have the decoding capabilities for whatever codec resides in some of those mkv's.

Re: MiniDLNA

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried browsing 10.00 tunes, series episodes and flicks on DLNA?

I guess the above should read 10.000 tunes... Nevertheless, I'm using minidlna with something like 25.711 files and browsing works just fine.

There are two things to keep in mind:

1. it takes quite a while for miniDLNA to reconstruct its database if you remove it. Time gets into order of minutes.
2. number of files, monitored by any user process, is limited by default. For such numerous collections one needs to increase fs.inotify.max_user_watches above the number of media files being served. If the limit is too low, minidlna will not notice many changes (additions and removals of media files)

To make browsing through multimedia collection, one can run a few minidlna processes in parallel ... a patched version exists that allows such a setup. When doing so, DLNA client will see many DLNA services, each carrying its own multimedia collection subtree.

Indeed minidlna does not do any recoding (on the fly), you can do it manually for the problematic files (say using excelent tool ffmpeg).

Re:MiniDLNA

[neokushan]

I've found the 360 to be extremely hit and miss when it comes to decoding certain media. MKV's especially are a nightmare with it. I ended up using my PS3 for streaming for a long time, but realistically nothing quite beats the likes of XBMC for media support.

I've had a raspberry pi since launch (I got one of the first batches) and XBMC was quite flaky at first, especially with things like DTS decoding but right now it's very stable and I find I have few issues these days. There's the odd MKV that gives it trouble, but it's usually an issue with the file (such as it using a high bitrate or something).

Re:MiniDLNA

[JoeMerchant]

One better, I have a 1TB self powered drive connected to the WiFi / Router - it shares over Samba, but, alas, no DLNA.

I played the whole DLNA game with PS3 and a mini-linux-media-server-thing. PS3 was picky as hell about encodings, mini-server-thing fried its power supply and had formatted the internal HD in non-standard (PITA to recover) format.

I'll only build collections on external HD from now on, they're just too cheap and universally compatible to go with anything more proprietary.

Re:MiniDLNA

[AlphaWolf_HK]

I'm thinking this is due to Plex working as a library rather than a blind playback system. What this means is that if it can't associate your video clip with the name of any movie it finds on IMDB (or something similar, whatever it uses) then it won't advertise it to the clients, assuming you've put it in that mode anyways (which I think it does by default if you categorize them as movies.) You can probably address this by putting it into a folder with a name exactly matching the IMDB entry along with the year in parenthesis.

Re:MiniDLNA

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like Fuppes is now on GitHub. Last commit was 3 days ago, I guess it's still alive.

XBMC ftw

[AoOs]

XBMC is your go-to media server software.

Install it, set the path for your content and it'll take care of the rest.
Subtitles can even be setup to be downloaded automatically.

xbmc.org

Re:XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as i understand it, XBMC is not a media SERVER, but a front-end media PLAYER. He has that Netgear NeoTV which he wants to utilise for that. This is where I beleive his problem lies - in that this device doesnt support all the formats he wants to play. He's expecting a media server to transcode the content into content the NeoTV will play.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

Plex uses the same regex-based naming detector as XBMC, so XBMC would be unable to see the same files Plex is unable to see.

Plex really is the best option out there. I would recommend seriously looking at the naming conventions required to have XBMC/Plex recognize media, rather than trying to fit a server to a broken media collection. There are automated scripts that can help rename files correctly, so it's not a huge burden.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Zouden]

Not if it's a codec issue that causes Plex to refuse to recognise certain .mkv files.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. You could also give the Raspberry Pi a go with one of the dedicated media centre distros, although I've never actualy tried them. For iPlayer there's a command line tool called get_iplayer, it allows you to download iPlayer programmes directly, although lack of BBC support for Linux means there's one significant bug - it doesn't auto-delete programmes after 7 days, so you have to do that yourself to ensure you stay within copyright....

Re:XBMC ftw

[michrech]

If it's a codec issue, he needs to remedy that in his OS...

Re:XBMC ftw

[profplump]

Plex uses an internal ffmpeg to decode (and transcode, if needed) media files -- if it doesn't play there it will be hard to play in general. And you don't need to muck with an OS-level codecs, as Plex won't see or use them anyway.

But that's not relevant in this discussion; Plex will add files to the library even if it can't read them, so long as it can figure out from the file path what they are. If you need Plex to parse the tags in the file it will have to be able to decode it, but if it can match based on the name it doesn't care if the file can even be opened.

The problem is almost certainly a naming issue, or possibly a selection of the wrong scanner type. If you select a TV or Movie scanner Plex will only add files it can specifically match to databases like thetvdb.com, and you must use one of the naming conventions to help it do so. If you just want it to put up all of your media as-is without matching against a DB you need to select the "Home Videos" scanner type, which simply walks the filesystem and builds a matching hierarchy in the Plex library. And of course Music has its own scanner, which can similarly match against Last.fm or simply read local tags, depending on wishes.

It's not quite brain-dead simple if you have a mess of unorganized media, but it's not hours of work either, and the DB-matching modes provide rich metadata with all the hassle of ensuring that your paths include the series title and episode number somewhere along the line.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Lumpy]

"Netgear NeoTV which he wants to utilise for that."

He can, you pick it up, walk over to the trash bin and drop it inside. He wants to use a toy he got duped into buying, there is no happiness until he realizes that and get's rid of it.

XBMC on a low end core duo throwaway PC and a mild out of date nvidia video card will blow away any device you can buy to play back media on your TV. utterly blow it away.

and the side effect, the same XBMC pc can act as the media server so it is an all in one solution. but you can not buy one. You have to spend time to build it and you have to take the time to educate yourself on how to build it. He refuses to even spend time fixing his problem.

Re:XBMC ftw

[gbjbaanb]

yes and no - whilst XBMC is an awesome media client, it also does have a little bit of server code tucked away insode it, so you can load it up, and use it to stream stuff across a DLNA link very easily.

It has 2 problems with using it in this way - first there is no "run headless" mode, and 2nd, it doesn't stop Windows from going to sleep when it wants.

Re: XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

And Plex can if you configure a profile for it if need be (is if one doesn't already exist). That's what I did for my Dish Hopper/Joey setup as it didn't like .m4v files and some .avi's. A quick and dirty profile for it and it now plays them all fine.
As for the folders and stuff not showing, I'm wondering if folds rpermissions are set correctly for plex to read/see them and if the service doesn't just need restarted and then a scan of the folder ran again.
I have had no issues other than sometimes needing a service restart after a deep scan (most likely due to I'm impatient lol) and I have other friends with massive video and music libraries which plex is working fine with.

Plus the channels for plex (pulling shows and videos off of various website such as comedy central, ABC, etc) is always a nice extra

Re:XBMC ftw

[AoOs]

Some QNAP NAS can run XBMC out of the box. They even come with a remote control. No need for a PC, if you just want a simple solution with XBMC.

Re:XBMC ftw

[secondhand_Buddah]

XMBC also functions as a DNLA server when it is running

Re:XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

So run XBMC on Linux. Problem solved!

Re:XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not quite brain-dead simple if you have a mess of unorganized media

Several other solutions are, though. This is why Plex is an inferior solution, as the author has already figured out.

Re:XBMC ftw

[RoboJ1M]

XBMC has a DLNA server switch you can turn on.
Seemed to work pretty well.

Re:XBMC ftw

[aitikin]

You say that there are other solutions that are brain-dead simple, but you don't list any, so without that, I cite the age old internet adage, link or it didn't happen.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

I've use mythtv and plex (used to use XBMC, but its not really a server based solution). Plex handles everything I throw at it, tv or movies. Only times I've had strange problems were when the wrong scanner type was picked. The tv and movies need to be in separate sections. All the media can't just be grouped in one place. Plex is certainly the simplest solution I've found for doing this.

The other part is, even if you do find something else, it'll be tough dealing with the client side as plex has pretty good clients for just about everything.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Macgruder]

I have an Acer 3-core low profile PC w/ Win 7 that runs XBMC 12. The same app is on both of my tablets (Nexus 10). The media is stored on D-Link NAS drives and is accessible across the network from anywhere in my home. Works awesome. Setup was as simple as specifying the SMB path to the NAS, and letting XBMC run it's media scraper to collect all the file names. I have a large collection of digitized anime, and XBMC handles handles MKV files with subtitles and dual audio as well.

With the full range of plugins that can be added to XBMC, I use to to play my Hulu+ and Amazon Prime. I've seen plugins for the BBC iPlayer, but as I'm not in the UK I can't access it.

XBMC rocks.

Re:XBMC ftw

[RulerOf]

XBMC on a low end core duo throwaway PC and a mild out of date nvidia video card will blow away any device you can buy to play back media on your TV. utterly blow it away.

My two cents: used Mac Minis are *really* good for an HTPC application such as this. Low power consumption, quiet operation, tiny footprint, and decent mid-range hardware on even the baseline models of a given generation. They also have decent wifi chips too: I run Windows Media Center on mine (a mid-2008 model), and it connects wirelessly for everything, including to its network-based CableCARD tuner.

I wish they were a little cheaper, but Apple has done a great job of filling the "I want a very small, but capable x86 machine in THIS tiny spot..." market.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest XBMC is such a confusing mess on how to set up anything to actually be worthwhile, it's not worth the trouble. And where did the scripting stuff go....

Re:XBMC ftw

[kyldere]

I'd suspcect a permissions issue before a codec issue with Plex. I know that I've forgotten to go back in and change the owner/group of the files I just transferred to the shared directory on my Plex server numerous times, and the "new" media will either not show up on the dash, or not stream. Fixing the permissions has (almost) always fixed this.

Re:XBMC ftw

[war4peace]

Confirmed. I have a library of over 1000 movies, about 60 full TV Series and close to 10K music albums. Out of all, the only mild issue I have is when trying to find something in the music repository. PLEX search kind of blows, unfortunately.
Furthermore, if you have thousands of albums in one place, scrolling down a lot yields weird behaviors.

Re:XBMC ftw

[multimediavt]

"Netgear NeoTV which he wants to utilise for that."

He can, you pick it up, walk over to the trash bin and drop it inside. He wants to use a toy he got duped into buying, there is no happiness until he realizes that and get's rid of it.

XBMC on a low end core duo throwaway PC and a mild out of date nvidia video card will blow away any device you can buy to play back media on your TV. utterly blow it away.

and the side effect, the same XBMC pc can act as the media server so it is an all in one solution. but you can not buy one. You have to spend time to build it and you have to take the time to educate yourself on how to build it. He refuses to even spend time fixing his problem.

I wish /. rankings went to 11. Best answer to a stupid question I have seen in years, if not ever. I would just add, that you want to have a spare machine around if you are cobbling this together from eBay. That, and it will give the OP a machine to use to learn more while he still enjoys the production setup. Heaven forbid there's learning involved!

Re:XBMC ftw

[jedidiah]

> My two cents: used Mac Minis are *really* good for an HTPC application such as this.

It depends on the hardware. You really have to know what you are buying. Otherwise, you will just end up with a doorstop. I still have one of those doorstops myself.

Anything with an nvidia GPU (ION) is your best option with AMD being a good alternative if you're running Windows.

Apple's version of Purevideo doesn't support everything the underlying hardware does.

Re:XBMC ftw

[nabsltd]

XBMC on a low end core duo throwaway PC and a mild out of date nvidia video card will blow away any device you can buy to play back media on your TV. utterly blow it away.

I have a different version of the Netgear NeoTV (the NTV550), and also have XBMC, and both have their strengths and weaknesses.

The NeoTV takes far less time to index my media collection, can play back Blu-Ray disk images including displaying menus, uses almost no power, is tiny, cost far less than any PC ($99), and generally has a better user experience, since the remote wasn't an add-on option.

XBMC has better display and search of metadata, can stream from more online sources, can handle more media items without a need to restart every month or so, and is more configurable (which is also a minus, as you can spend days just tweaking).

Other than that, both essentially support the same audio and video formats (although it wasn't until the latest version of XBMC that you could decode lossless commercial audio formats), the same ways to get to your local media (CIFS, NFS, and DLNA), and have the same quality of output. XBMC has a small advantage because it is running on a PC in that I can easily put a decent amount of content local to the player, while the NeoTV has no internal drives...but does support eSATA and USB.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is almost certainly a naming issue, or possibly a selection of the wrong scanner type.

I came here to say exactly this. I similarly had a library of arbitrarily named files, only half of which showed up. Admittedly it took a few hours to name everything correctly, but once I did, everything shows up properly.

The official guide to naming things such that Plex knows what they are is here: https://plexapp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/200028098-Media-Preparation. Next, I found the $20 File Renamer Turbo over at http://www.kristanixsoftware.com to be excellent and effective, especially for TV episodes. Surely there's a freeware/open source alternative, but the devs over there are great and the software works really well.

Once the files are named correctly, Plex /will/ pick it up. If anything, the OP may need to wipe and re-make the media categories. Other than that, well, the "Home Videos" catch-all category works well.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Brama]

A thousand times this. I recently got a 2007 core-duo laptop (2x2Ghz) with a broken screen for less than 20$ off ebay, ran OpenElec on it from a USB stick, and hooked it up to a tv. Plays everything, plus has a great interface. And barely requires any setting up other than choosing the right OpenElec version.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Dynedain]

And for extending your library to your scattered TVs, there's a free Plex app for Roku. (not to mention the Android, iOS, Windows Media Center, and various Smart TV apps)

Oh, and any libraries shared by Plex are also shared via DNLA, so any DNLA-capabale device (again, Smart TVs, XBox, stereo systems, etc) can access the content.

I don't know how well Plex handles audio libraries, but I don't use it for that, and honestly I don't think managing and sharing an audio library is quite the same challenge as a video library.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

Other solutions can be easier, depending on your definition of "easier". For example, servers that don't support DB matching and simply provide your existing file structure via another protocol are certainly easier to configure. On the other hand you have to do all your own file management, either at storage time or at playback time, and find a solution to get whatever metadata you want, as opposed to just dropping all your files into a single directory and letting the server sort it out for you. (And as noted, Plex does support a non-matched scanning mode, it just isn't the *only* mode supported).

If all you want is a way to get files onto another box Plex maybe isn't the right option. But many people want something more; saying Plex inferior because it supports an organized library is like saying that planes are inferior to cars because they support ariel travel.

If you disagree -- if you know of a media sharing system that both can take a directly fully of randomly named media of files and build a coherent, metadata-rich browsing structure, please let us know, as it's probably a worthwhile solution to consider (and something that the Plex devs would be interested to copy/integrate). But from your comments thus far I suspect it's not something that's actually available.

RE:XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

On top of that, XBMC is trivial to learn for anyone with even a speck of technical skill. I setup my XBMC HTPC/gaming rig last year in literally a couple of hours. All it took was a little poking a minimum of forum surfing. I was going to set it up as an OTA DVR as well and found the instructions to do so easy to follow. That plan was later dropped so I can't say first-hand whether it works well in this capacity.

Re:XBMC ftw

[jedidiah]

Plex is inferior because it fails to correctly deal with certain types of media. All of the pretty cover art doesn't mean anything if it doesn't handle your media properly.

A client that can handle it's own decoding is not stuck with any bad decisions made by the media server.

As far as "metadata rich" goes. That was in XBMC before Plex was ever even started.

Re: XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

I use handbrake to transcode all videos to m4v. This ensures they all play ok on plex as well as any android or ios device. An extra step to be sure but it always works.

Re: XBMC ftw

[war4peace]

I have 6 TB of video files and that's really, REALLY not an option :)

Re:XBMC ftw

[KingMotley]

A server that does the decoding is superior because it doesn't require all of your clients to be able to decode it.

Currently I'm using a Plex Server, and I have a number of clients that I use... iPhone 5, Android, PS3, Chromecast, Web, and Apple TV (via iPhone 5). It also supports offline syncing to the iPhone 5 and Android so I can watch media when I'm not at home, supports sharing of libraries locally and through the internet. It also supports multiple users, tracking each users watched list, so my wife watching something doesn't immediately remove it from my queue of things to watch.

XBMC while having a superior client interface, is a poor media server. FYI - XBMC also has a nice plug in for accessing plex media servers, which works quite well.

Re:XBMC ftw

[KingMotley]

Oh, and getting XBMC to share it's watched list across multiple devices running XBMC is a pain the ass or near impossible depending on what devices and what type of connectivity (if any) they have to each other.

Re:XBMC ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with this 110% There are also different variations of the XBMC platform. I have a Raspberry Pi running OpenElec and am able to see all video and audio formats 1080P playback. The best part is there are remote apps for your smart phone, the best is Yatse only available on android for free.

Re:XBMC ftw

[cthulhu11]

I haven't used XBMC strictly, but my Boxee Box works really well for this, despite it now being abandonware. I really wanted to like Roku, but they have some bug up their ass about divx/avi support. If I had to replace my BB today, I might look at a WDTV. They seem to have broad format support and their prices have come down.

Can I suggest:

[DickMoohan]

Four letters: XBMC ....Strongly recommended, plays pretty much anything and also has loads of add-ons.

just wake up & start clicking

[Anonymous Coward]

your service to the media begins again

PS3 Media Server

[narfdude]

XBMC but on a PC might be annoying? Also take a look at PS3 Media Server - I used to use it before moving to a NAS, works really well

Re:PS3 Media Server

[CanadianSchism]

I'll second PMS (hurr hurr).

After following guides to get different renderers/transcoders going to play pretty much anything, the only negative that I've found with it is upgrading. A lot of the times, an upgrade to the software will result in previously playable files becoming unreadable by the PS3.

So I've stuck with the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." You find a version that works, and stick with it.

Re:PS3 Media Server

[jimshatt]

I actually prefer it above the DLNA server in my NAS. It's highly configurable, extensible (although I can't always get every plugin to work), and has support for a lot of TVs and other front-ends.

Re:PS3 Media Server

[Anonymous Coward]

I built a NAS box with Windows 8 using the storage pools and running PS3 Media Server. I download everything to the NAS and have it robocopy wirelessly to a drive on my PC as a backup. Works great with a PS3 plus the PS3 obviously has a Blu-ray player. I was going to use Windows Home Server 2012 but they removed the only reason to buy it... the storage pools. One word of warning though. Windows 8 does not come with RDP (although somehow they gave it storage pools???). You have to go Windows 8 Pro to get RDP or just use UltraVNC like I did. Its pretty rare for me to find anything it won't play. The only thing I can think of is my Shadowplay videos of Battlefield 4 in 1080p @ 60FPS. I know its not the NAS though, those won't even play well from a USB drive plugged directly into the PS3. I think I will have to re-render them @ 30FPS.

VLC will do this surely?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use VLC for all those tasks, the interface isn't great but I'm sure it could be made to do the job and it's fully controllable by multiple android apps. Not sure about the bbc iplayer or netflix issue though.

Re:VLC will do this surely?

[flyingfsck]

Yeah, VLC and ffserver come to mind. They work. Nuf sed.

WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Camembert]

The Western Digital TV live box is cheap and it plays almost any reasonable media file (except flv) you'd throw at it. Certainly the ones prevalent on internet. It can access a shared folder on your computer so you don't have to walk around with that stick anymore. To be fair, I only use it for downloaded video files. For music and photo I have an Apple TV, I love its GUI and easy integration in our Mac/IOS based home.

Re: WD TV Live plays almost everything

[blocsync]

I also use and recommend the WD TV Live. I use it in conjunction with a rooted Seagate Go flex home 3 tb NAS. I run transmission on the NAS and use is Web interface to snag torrents of movies and shows. I can then turn my computer off and still be downloading and watching movies. I have 3 of the WD units and they all stream from the NAS simultaneously without skipping a beat.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Sandman1971]

I third this recommendation. I have 3 WD Live boxes in my house, all connecting to my media SANs (DNS 323s with DLNA enabled) , streaming my music, videos and photos. It also does netflix, Hulu (US only), Pandora, YouTube, TuneIn, Shoutcast and a few dozen other built in apps. The best deal is to get them at Costco as they're not only cheaper but they come with a HDMI cable. The one I bought at an electronics store didn't come with the HDMI.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[NapalmV]

The WD does indeed play almost every format, and for the odd files, there's handbrake to help converting them to something that works. A Haswell Quick Sync capable graphics chip (e.g 4600) will make short work of any transcoding job - hours of waiting become minutes.

Re: WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Baldorcete]

I don't know how new Asus o'Play handles every format, but I have a 5 years old, first generation one, that plays everything except flv. And easy acces to shared folders or DLNA.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[LordNimon]

I also love my WD TV Live. I don't need to use Handbrake any more -- anything I rip to an MKV (either DVD or Blu-ray) works great as-is. Any video I've ever downloaded from the Internet also works as-is.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Kardos]

I fourth this suggestion. Got it about a year ago, have been quite happy with it. It plays everything I've tried to play including subtitles, and it mounts NFS shares from a LAN linux box effortlessly (mounts CIFS too if you prefer). Also plays netflix and youtube, but the text entry leaves a lot to be desired (character by character with a remote), I haven't tried connecting a (wireless) keyboard to the USB port but that may solve that problem too.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[realityimpaired]

Ditto.

I have a WDTV Live! and it plays just about everything I have ever tried to throw at it. It has a Netflix client which I use extensively, as well as Hulu and other streaming media services. And it has built-in wireless N, in addition to Ethernet connectivity.

I stream media from a NAS which is sharing using SMB/Windows share. It supports DLNA, but I only use that for audio (because my stereo amplifier has a DLNA client built in for audio), but it can also build a media library for the audio files from the SMB share, and index them by all of the info in the metadata tags. Very happy with it.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Big_Breaker]

I have the same setup people hear are talking about - headless NAS serving multiple WDTV boxes.

Don't "forget" to upgrade the firmware to WDLXTV firmware. It adds tons of features - nzbget, torrents, nfs, DNLA, subtitle download and much more. In a pinch you can even have one of the boxes serve content off a USB drive.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[IronChef]

How did I not know about this firmware project? Thanks for posting that!

WDTV is fantastic... sometimes, even computer guys don't want another computer around.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Does free Hulu or only Hulu Plus? The lack of free Hulu on ANY set top box is why I ended up going with a HTPC.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Camembert]

I have to admit: I wrote that it plays ALMOST anything. Of late there have been some anime files that don't play at all. They do play on the Mac on VLC. The use h264 codec. really puzzling. But in general it works like a charm.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[mu51c10rd]

I also have a WD TV Live box. I paired it with a NAS and a machine running Playon...and have all the content to keep the family happy. WD listens to their users too...(when I was active in their forums, they invited me into their beta program)...it's always improving.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Taelron]

I use to have WD Live devices on each of my TV's pulling from a network share. The problem is once you get a super large library (over 1000 movies, hundreds of tv show episodes) the WD Live units bog down and are slow to scan (5 minutes initially on power up to over 15 for a large library) and you have to wait to use them.

The WD Lives cant be left on or plugged in, each of t he 3 unit I had would get extremely hot, even left plugged in and powered down. We took to unplugging the power from them when we wouldn't be home for a few days just to be safe.

I ended up going from WD Live to Plex and have been much happier with it. I have the Plex media server installed on my PC and then placed Roku 3 s at each of my TV's. We can access the media anywhere in the house now, including our tablets. With plex I can even access my media files at home while traveling using my tablets as long as I have a good Wi-Fi signal.

Plex also automatically locks into my ITunes library seamlessly and allows me to pull up any music or playlists through Plex.

One of my TV's does support DNLA, and so does my R6300 router. I initially tried to use that to serve up my media but it didn't send Metadata. And while the TV will see the DNLA media files from any server, it will not play mkv files. Hence my using Roku 3's everywhere.

With Plex android tablet you can throw any media to any player in the house you want. On the Ipad you can download/sync any media... I do wish both devices supported both features instead of one and one.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[hodet]

I have a WD TV Live as well. It works well enough allthough I have had no luck with Netflix. I can still watch netflix, bu I am having problems making it use the entire screen (16x9) for movies. I stream video, pictures, music via an SMB share to a linux box in the basement.

I am sure all the folks that put time into a Myth box or have a full pc running XBMC have setups that will kick this things ass, but for $100 and 10 minutes of my time to setup, it is good enough.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[hodet]

"....sometimes, even computer guys don't want another computer around."
---
100% this.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Another here! Plays my Netflix as well, and I can use my own DNS without being blocked by Sony. (a la PS3) I have an Airplay hooked up to my sound system that I can access via my notebook and iTunes. (as much as I hate iTunes)

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[hodet]

Almost forgot, don't forget the WDlxTV Remote for Android. That thing is great and pretty much makes using the included physical remote a painful experience.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[aztracker1]

+1 here... it works for Netflix, and can play most files over straight SMB/CIFS shares... though, still no Amazon video support iirc... I've been using one of these in my bedroom a couple years. In my living room, I have an HTPC with Ubuntu + XBMC, which works well for all but netflix (but the TV has netflix support built in). I've ordered an i-Cubox pro, and may try that with XBMC as well.

WD is probably the best option for network content out of the box though.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 +2 +*
I've tried roku and plex and that non-free plex competitor I don't remember the name of and everything under the sun but the single most well-functioning thing for this I've yet done is simply getting the WDTV and sharing a movies folder on my network. It's that simple and the WDTV hasn't barfed on a single codec or format yet. I have a current generation model, can't speak to previous generations, and annoyingly they use the same naming scheme for current and older generation models so finding accurate reviews can be difficult because of that, but the current WD TV Live Streaming Media Player is a fantastic cheap solution to the problem. Plays Hulu and Netflix better than other devices I've tried also including functionality for NetFlix profiles which has finally caused the kids cartoons to no longer show up in my wife and I's profile.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Anonymous Coward]

The WD TV is a nice first choice for most things, but not everything. I watch a lot of anime, and it didn't handle many various softsubs. It doesn't need a fancy media server, just a SMB share off a box or NAS. Simple. For file support in a standalone media player, I haven't found anything better than the original Boxee (which is based on XBMC - I use Boxee Hacks firmware). That said, there is no support for 10bit MKVs, which a lot of fansubbers tend to use for some stupid reason. No hardware devices support 10bit MKV decoding, it is done in software. Media servers will not help you there either. I have not seen a media server that supports 10bit MKVs.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Anonymous Coward]

I have several WDTV's (different versions as well) and about 7k video files and none of them are as slow as you describe. I'm glad you found plex, but none of my WDTVs have the problems you describe. it works really well. Also check out wdtvhubgen.codeplex.com for a program that will help automatically find and create the metadata for all of your movie and tv episodes.

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[masterjames]

you, camembert, should look into installing xbmc on your appetv. you have a western digital tv live that plays your local content but with a quick install of xbmc you could do exactly what the western digital tv live does from the same apple tv. no need for two devices that do the same thing. anyway, have a great day!

Re:WD TV Live plays almost everything

[Camembert]

Thanks, MR James. I don't expect that the wd tv live would be able to completely replace the Apple TV if it were running xbmc. Would it run as smoothly and as elegantly integrated with the Mac environment as the apple TV? Can you mirror the iphone and ipad screens on it through wifi? Can you rent movies from iTunes? Can my visiting friends immediately stream the media on their ios device to the tv via wifi? All nice features of the Apple TV.
These are 2 very smalll boxes, I don't mind having two of these devices around.

xbmc on whatever it runs on

[Anonymous Coward]

i use an RSS auto-downloading feed to a linux box that has 8tb of zfs that runs xbmc. xbmc's library and "recently added" plus scraping is awesome. anyone know if they're going to do xbmc for ps4 or xbone? easy to port over but indy-app fees might need a kickstart or something

get_iplayer

[cyborg_zx]

I'm pretty sure this supports streaming although I've not used it in that manner - preferring instead to simply download before using.

Re:get_iplayer

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in the world do people come into threads and offer suggestions they haven't tried?

Re:get_iplayer

[cyborg_zx]

That I cannot speak to its ability to stream doesn't stop me from speaking to its ability to download content that could still be used on a mediaserver as I do.

Why do anonymous cowards come into threads to troll? Sorry, question answers itself.

this is what i do...

[issicus]

plug your tv into a computer running vlc. activate web interface on vlc. download vlc remote (fork) on your tablet . control your tv with tablet .

If you find one, let me know...

[Anonymous Coward]

..I've tried quite a lot, none were out of the box perfect. Closest has been Openelec.

Currently I'm running openelec on an old P4 2.8GHZ machine joined to the TV via VGH and it works nicely. Based on XBMC, it has the same issue, in that if you want the best out of it and you media to be 'found' (ie displayed in a nicely presented coverflow type menu) you need it tagged and organised correctly.

Took some fiddling to get sound via streaming content though, and there's still no sound streaming from Apple devices.

I've used a Rasberry PI and openelec to do the same job; again worked quite well; little bit laggy, but acceptable. (Streamed content from apple device with sound; no problem. Had the bonus of decoding the TV remotes signal via the HDMI lead via some majic)

I've tried serviio in the past, which worked very well also. In this configuration it streamed content to the TV via DLNA. Had the bonus of running on a 'full' linux server, so I could install other services with no trouble. (Like shoutcast and icecast )

(Openelec is designed to be more of a closed device; the system partion is mounted readonly at boot. Rolling your own openelec environment is possible; but looks too fiddly for me.)

Took quite a bit of fiddling as I had to download and compile quite a bit of ffmpeg and associated stuff to get content to stream to the TV. It also streamed succesfully to other DLNA compatible devices around the house.

Mac Mini + VLC

[Anonymous Coward]

Plays everything. No fuss.

Don't need no fancy interface, just organize your files on an external drive and use the Finder. Simple and effective. You can make playlists easily, too, for stringing together whole seasons of shows.

Re:Mac Mini + VLC

[michrech]

Yes, and it'd *only* cost !$600! if you buy a new one...

Re:Mac Mini + VLC

[jythie]

Until I repurposed it, I was using my first generation G4 mac-mini + VLC for this just fine. 16GB SSD, videos stored on a NAS, quite, cheap, works like a charm.

But yeah, that does require going the 'used' route.

Re:Mac Mini + VLC

[jedidiah]

> Until I repurposed it, I was using my first generation G4 mac-mini + VLC for this just fine.

Then you weren't stressing it very hard. In fact, I am pretty sure you were going out of your way not to stress it at all as there's very little that such an old Mac will decode by itself.

At that point, you might as well just use a Roku.

I keep it simple.

[jtownatpunk.net]

I plug my laptop into the TV and play stuff from my storage array.

If I wanted some sort of dedicated device, I'd put XBMC on a Raspberry Pi, point it at my array, and control it with my phone, tablet, or laptop.

Re:I keep it simple.

[rikkards]

even better is XBMC on pi uses libcec so you can control it from your TV remote.

Re:I keep it simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

and it has a bbc player plugin

Re:I keep it simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

or control it with a wireless keyboard!

Re:I keep it simple.

[sl4shd0rk]

even better is XBMC on pi

Theoretically, yes. In reality, no. the MPEG license and lack of a "finished" distro is a real killer. Maybe things have changed in the last year, but all of the Pi options I found crashed in flames when it came to troublefree video streaming.

Re:I keep it simple.

[CppDeveloper]

Try again. OpenELEC or RaspBMC have made great gains and raspberry pi distros dedicated to running XBMC. I have tried OpenELEC and it has worked VERY well so far.

Re:I keep it simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had XMBC running on two separate pi's for the last 8 months without any hiccups. They read the same nfs mounted directory from my main computer. My only issue (which is my own fault completely) is that I didn't set up a shared library in the beginning and now it will show a movie watched in one room but not the other.

Re:I keep it simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

Things have changed alot. All my TV is served through rPI's with OpenElec.

A couple notes:
Most modern TV's have a usb port that can power the rPi
CEC works sometimes (depends on the TV.. not the software's fault) when it works, it's great!
you do have to buy the MPEG license.
If you go through the trouble of setting up the mysql database sharing... it's really nice!

USB mass storage network file share

[Anonymous Coward]

At the chearp end, many consumer devices have USB sockets that allow you to play certain media files from USB sticks etc. Going a bit more expensive, some have networking and often poorly implemented methods to access files.

I've looked and failed to find a device that looks like a mass storage device to the host, but is actually wired or wireless ethernet linked to a samba or NFS share elsewhere on the network and pretending to be a mass storage device.
That way I could harness cheap devices throughout and yet store all my media files in one place.

Does anyone know of such a device ?
Seems something that would be trivial to implement in an ATTiny etc, if only I had the skills...

Its not the server

[Anonymous Coward]

The problems you've found come not from the server, but from the netgear box you are using. Apparently, it only supports USB or DLNA to play your local content, and that is a huge limitation. Should it support some other ways to access your content, you could play whatever you wanted; for example, windows networking, that is native in windows machines and easily incorporated into linux machines via the samba package and (I think) also in OSX machines. That way, anything in your computer could be accessed from the client machine just by locally sharing the path where you store it.

So, really, the best solution would be to have a more capable box in your TV (a XBMC box will be probably the best solution, although it can take some time to configure everything properly, specially if you want just one box and so XBMC need to take care of netflix etc to get rid of the netgear device).

If you do not want to add a new box to the TV and keep only your actual netgear client machine, you must then bend everything else to cope with its limitations, in this case you should look for a capable DLNA server that plays nice both with your actual content (format, naming convention, etc) and also with the special needs of the NeoTV Max, whatever they are; plex is one possibility, and there are others, but probably none will be at the same time good enough, cheap enough and easy enough for your purposes. But the main culprit is the less-than-capable box in your TV: local windows sharing should be more than enough.

ps3mediaserver

[Anonymous Coward]

ps3mediaserver, regardless of the name, works right out of the box and streams just about everything (the backend uses ffmpeg, mplayer, vlc, and tsmuxer). Subtitles also work as expected.

http://www.ps3mediaserver.org/

Re:ps3mediaserver

[michrech]

I wouldn't suggest ps3mediaserver for one reason -- the various .nzb sites I use are filled with comments of ps3mediaserver users having one problem or another with playback of the .mkv's they're downloading...

Re:ps3mediaserver

[Anonymous Coward]

MKVs are just audio-video container formats, same as AVI and MP2/4. The problems those users are experiencing are due to the audio/video CODECs used to encode the content inside those MKVs. Same as with UMS, ps3mediaserver works a lot better if you have VLC installed on the server instead of just the FFMPEG libraries, since it has more options available for transcoding to formats that the connecting clients actually support (that's why there are so many DLNA client profiles kicking around).

Re:ps3mediaserver

[Malc]

Maybe try the DLNA server in DivX 10, if you can run on OS X or WIndows.. DivX know a little bit about MKV.

Re:ps3mediaserver

[Anonymous Coward]

Universal Media Server, a fork of PS3mediaserver. http://www.universalmediaserver.com/ I run it on Ubuntu server and it just works, no matter what video file I throw at it.

Re:ps3mediaserver

[KingMotley]

I tried ps3mediaserver, it was pretty bad.

Awesome thread

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a great thread for people to get some ideas on what NOT to do.

Come on, people. No one wants to break out a circuit board and build their own solution. No one wants to hook up to a PC and break out a keyboard every time they want to watch movie with the family. No one cares about things "you haven't tried, but will probably work".

Jesus Christ. This is not an unsolvable problem. Cheap, elegant, well-documented and functional solutions already exist for this problem.

Re:Awesome thread

[cyborg_zx]

Well thanks for your references to the cheap, elegant, well-documented and functional solutions that already exist. I find those really helpful.

Oh wait, I don't because they don't exist.

AC Troll.

Re:Awesome thread

[Lumpy]

" Cheap, elegant, well-documented and functional"

pick only 2 from that list though.

you seem to not understand how things really work out there. You can not have all 4, it does not exist.

Re:Awesome thread

[michrech]

I've seen several comments for Plex and XMBC, both of which don't require one to "break out a circuit board and build their own solution." In the case of Plex, you don't have to 'break out a keyboard every time they want to watch a movie," either. In the case of Android, WP8, and IOS there are apps that can be downloaded that will act as a remote for the Plex Home Theater (which would be installed on a PC connected to your TV). Not everyone may want to sit down and use their phone/tablet to start a movie, but I don't see it as being too different from using a normal TV/media player remote...

Re:Awesome thread

[pspahn]

I'll bite. I'll even be so kind as to preface this with I am simply a user of this product. Shillflame me all you want ...

My brother got me a Chromecast for Xmas. It's a pretty sweet gift for a brother because he knows I wouldn't buy one for myself, and yet they're only $35.

I tried it out, and was initially pretty disappointed. Being locked in to only being able to cast Chrome tabbed content felt like a gross artificial limitation. I figured it was just the was it was gonna be.

I found some workarounds by using remote desktop to remote into your own desktop inside a tab so you could then cast it to the TV. Phew. That was a ridiculous waste of effort along the lines of building a Java VM inside Javascript.

Then I discovered (I never saw it before ... not that it wasn't there, just never saw it) the little arrow icon that gives you an option to "Cast Desktop". From then it was on. I can now just put the laptop on full screen and hit play.

The tradeoff for not having to deal with audio cables is that you do need to have a good WiFi network to get the best performance. Here's my setup:

- Thinkpad g wifi

- custom 4core 16gb workstation upstairs serving media files

- workstation gets internet from 4g hotspot via USB

- hotspot as router, but only g wifi

So my laptop reads files over the g wifi >> shitty low power hotspot router >> USB >> spinning SATA II disk >> back to the laptop which then streams it back over the hotspot router to the Chromecast device which is once again another trip back downstairs.

If I leave my laptop just a few feet in the other room it works perfect. No hiccups. If I keep it near the TV it gets choppy every 3-5 minutes.

So like I said, if you have a good network, expect it to work at least better than that.

Re:Awesome thread

[mikelieman]

I was using my smartphone as a mythtv controller years ago.

Re:Awesome thread

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone may want to sit down and use their phone/tablet to start a movie, but I don't see it as being too different from using a normal TV/media player remote...

And this is why geeks are terrible people to go to for advice on stuff like this.

A flat touch screen is a TERRIBLE interface for controlling media.

Re:Awesome thread

[Anonymous Coward]

At the time the comment was written, almost every post was about Raspberry Pi and Plex. A couple of actual functional solutions had been recommended, but the majority of the thread was your typical neckbeard fare.

Anyway, thanks for your contribution. Like OP, you really offered a lot toward helping to reach a solution.

By the way, you can use the backspace key when the text is medium. This will help you to avoid those embarrassing "Oh wait" moments. When you realize you have made a mistake, simply backspace it. No need to ask everyone to wait while you correct it.

Re:Awesome thread

[Anonymous Coward]

ps3mediaserver seems to do all four of those.

Cheap

Free.

elegant

Installation and setup are as simple as "Next, next, Finish". Codecs and such are taken care of.

well-documented

Well-documented isn't really applicable since it just works, but the website has a great help section. And it's definitely functional.

Your standards are just way too low.

Re:Awesome thread

[NoZart]

Hm....
I must be doing something wrong. I use Yatse in tablet mode to control my media on xbmc, and i would never ever use a different interface again. Just the sliders for volume and time position and the browsing of the library are enough to never look back to remotes, pads or keyboards again (for me).

Also, the GF LOVES it as a second screen device when watching movies.

Re:Awesome thread

[cyborg_zx]

At the time the comment was written, almost every post was about Raspberry Pi and Plex. A couple of actual functional solutions had been recommended, but the majority of the thread was your typical neckbeard fare.

And so? Your solution to this is what? To complain about it.

Congratulations: you have become what you hate.

Anyway, thanks for your contribution. Like OP, you really offered a lot toward helping to reach a solution.

I did, in another thread in a minor way offering a suggestion on getting iplayer content to which I suspect you are the AC that got all upset that I didn't know explictly about a feature I hadn't tried as if that was completely useless information because of it. (Whether or not the questioner would have found it useful nonetheless to use the features of the program even without having to have it stream *directly* since it can just "record" it directly to disk for another program to use being up to him to decide, not you, O self-apointed arbiter of usefulness and apparently definitely not a neckbeard despite engaging in this sort of nonsense).

By the way, you can use the backspace key when the text is medium. This will help you to avoid those embarrassing "Oh wait" moments. When you realize you have made a mistake, simply backspace it. No need to ask everyone to wait while you correct it.

What the hell are you on about?

BTW:

When are you going to provide references to the cheap, elegant, well-documented and functional solutions that already exist troll?

You aren't?

That's what I thought. Feel free to continue complaining about how much of a non-contribution everyone else is providing in the meantime. It's not at all ironic.

Re:Awesome thread

[realityimpaired]

Well thanks for your references to the cheap, elegant, well-documented and functional solutions that already exist. I find those really helpful.

Oh wait, I don't because they don't exist.

Really? Funny. I thought that the WDTV Live! I bought was pretty cheap, all things considered. It does exactly what he wants (to replace the Netgear box he currently has), and it can play off network-mounted file shares, meaning that he doesn't actually have to install any packages on his Mint box at all, just tell it to share the folder in question by Samba.

Unless you think that setting up a Samba share is an unsolved problem?

Re:Awesome thread

[realityimpaired]

A flat touch screen is a TERRIBLE interface for controlling media.

Really? I find it very good for navigating DLNA content on my stereo, because I can easily scroll through the list of content and then just tap on the song/album I want to play.... It's *way* better than using the original remote that came with it...

Re:Awesome thread

[multimediavt]

Not everyone may want to sit down and use their phone/tablet to start a movie, but I don't see it as being too different from using a normal TV/media player remote...

And this is why geeks are terrible people to go to for advice on stuff like this.

A flat touch screen is a TERRIBLE interface for controlling media.

Hey troll, eff-off. Others, STOP FEEDING THE TROLLS! Igits.

Re:Awesome thread

[redmid17]

Chromecast is awesome and the 'cast desktop' is a beta feature IIRC. However the native apps for Netflix, HBOGO and Hulu pretty much rock.

Re:Awesome thread

[Anonymous Coward]

He meant that the GP didnt provide references to the solutions he mentioned - the references dont exist, not the solutions, dipshit.

Re:Awesome thread

[KingMotley]

As does the plex app.

Re:Awesome thread

[KingMotley]

And I would have to totally disagree on that. A flat touch screen is the BEST interface for controlling media.

Re:Awesome thread

[plover]

Consider the primary use of a remote is to operate a very limited set of functions while viewing the media: volume, pause, play, forward and reverse. If you were to count buttons you press, and how often you press them, those are the clear winners. The next level of functions is to select a piece of media: channel, movie, file, etc., or power on/off. You do these functions at a different time, when you are not actively watching the current media. The least used functions are setup and control types of activities, and you probably don't use those daily.

A touch screen excels at displaying the things you don't use all the time. There, a good interface can walk you through the stuff you're trying to do. It can group related controls, and put only the things you're likely to care about on the screen - maybe presenting sliders for adjusting colors, brightness, etc. A touch screen makes that easy.

A touch screen also excels for selecting media. As you noted, it can act as a second display, showing titles and other info. You can easily and quickly flip through your selections there, and you can see it without the awkward "10-foot-interface" of a typical on-screen-guide. And it can even display an on-screen keyboard for quick searching; entering a letter at a time on a 10-foot-interface is a lesson in stupid user interface design.

Where a touch screen is weakest is in the viewing functions. A good remote should allow you to do those few functions without drawing your eyes or your focus away from the media. But if you have to turn your attention away to see the volume slider, then drag on it, you're no longer focused on the show, and you've taken yourself away from the viewing experience.

Instead, for the viewing activities, it's best to have a tactile interface. Buttons that you can feel in the dark make it easy to do the tasks you need to do, and don't rip you out of the viewing experience. A touch screen is simply a bad choice there.

I had a Harmony 1100 remote that understood this really well. It was a hybrid, featuring a touch screen for dynamic controls, and had a dozen tactile buttons for the common viewing functions. It didn't do on-screen guides, though, and eventually I gave it up for a Google TV box with Bluetooth remote. While I still like the tactile buttons for viewing (apart from the bugs), it's been a serious downgrade for just about everything else. And running the Google TV remote via an iPad, iPhone, or computer interface doesn't help - as a matter of fact, it makes it much, much worse. I have to power on the screen, enter the unlock code, open the app, then navigate the app to find the remote screen and finally the volume button. It's a 10 second affair just to hit volume down, and by that time I've completely lost focus on the program.

Re:Awesome thread

[NoZart]

yatse solves this elegantly via swipe gestures for those "level 1" functions like volume, skipping and the like.

TVMobili DLNA Server

[BenJeremy]

I've been using TVMobili on a Kubuntu machine I have set up as a media server. It's not free... you can pay a one-time fee of $30 or $1.50 per month - but you can try it out first, to see if you like it. I've found it just works for everything I've thrown at it, I mostly use it for playback on my Samsung plasma smart TV (AllShare feature), handling MKVs, MP4s without a hitch, as well as the usual formats and containers. It can also do transcoding, and it has a web interface (My server sits in our basement).

I have streamed to iOS and Android devices, too (with the right media player clients).

Re: TVMobili DLNA Server

[Anonymous Coward]

I also use this,
Very handy, and being dlna I use bubbleupnp on my phone as a remote to play content

Use old PC

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot understand how little talk there is of the most simple solution of all. Use and old PC, and connect it to the TV with a HDMI cable, and a bluetooth mouse and bluetooth keyboard. If you want, install a blueray optical drive, and you are good to go. There is nothing you cant play on it.

Re:Use old PC

[Mr D from 63]

There is nothing you cant play on it.

Cassette tapes?

Re:Use old PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Old C64 serial port cassette drive. NEXT!

Tversity

[Anonymous Coward]

Tversity or PS3MediaServer are both very good, with the former being the more reliable of the two, and the latter delivering the best video quality for high resolution media. I've been using them for years.

Logitech Mediaserver (former squeezebox)

[m.hataj]

This was the one and only serving a TB-size musiccollection well. You can stream to different speakers, laptops, mobile phones in parallel. It's really good as DLNA server and you can have him on Linux, Mac, Windows, NAS, BSD. http://www.mysqueezebox.com/download I'm not sure on the FLOSS status, there are a lot parts from this development on sourceforge and github. And yes, it's running local as your server without any ties to Logitech. Give version 7.7 up to 7.8 a try, higher ones are crippled.

Try Rygel

[Gryftir]

http://www.murrayc.com/permalink/2012/06/22/rygel-for-a-dlna-player/

a simple

sudo apt-get install rygel will install on Mint, and there are other packages for preference settings and such. It's what I use, and it works.

If you find one, let me know!

[CapnTrippy]

I've tried quite a few; none of them were easypeasey to set up and get working faultlessly. Serviio was the best DLNA server I found. Installs to your current distribution; got quite close to out-of-the-box streaming to my Sony Bravia TV. Took quite a bit of fiddling to work perfectly; that involved downloading and compiling ffmpeg and other software. It also streamed nicely to other DLNA devices about the house. I was running it on a P4 2.8 ghz and it handled the transcoding of all the media I gave it. (Playback only being funny with DVDs I'd ripped myself; turns out I had to fix the framerate to PAL) Openelec was the best of the 'plug-it-in-to-the-tv' types. Based on XBMC it installed and worked out of the box onto a Rasberry PI. Although laggy sometimes and unable to really handle anything other than the default skin. Had the added bonus of decoding the TV remote signals via the HDMI lead via some magic. I'm currently running this via a P4 2.8ghz attached to the TV via VGA using an old windows media player IR remote. Almost worked out of the box. Streaming had no sound; which took some fiddling to get to work (Although Apples airplay still has no sound...) Openelec and XBMC both have the feature that they will only show you films nicely (in that cool coverflow/fanart interface) if you keep your media tagged and correctly organised. (See documentation for what XBMC thinks is correctly organised.) If you have a big collection of movies and tv shows with somewhat hard to interpret names; be prepared to spend some fun time tagging an organising them. (I recommend tinymediamanager to handle that job)

Raspberry Pi...one day?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Raspberry Pi running XBMC which does the majority of things you request really easily. But its a little fickle with things like iPlayer and Netflix so does assume you know what you're doing.

Perhaps one day they will get around to porting a recent version of Android to the Pi. In which case I think all your requests are met almost immediately.

Re:Raspberry Pi...one day?

[Lumpy]

It's also a little fickle with things like the UI being smooth, oh and indexing all the media into the library. the media library database will outgrow the XBMC card in short order.
I have 3 of them in the house, I will be replacing them with real XBMC pc's shortly due to how fickle they are.

Re:Raspberry Pi...one day?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also a little fickle with things like the UI being smooth, oh and indexing all the media into the library. the media library database will outgrow the XBMC card in short order. I have 3 of them in the house, I will be replacing them with real XBMC pc's shortly due to how fickle they are.

1) Openelec is smooth as butter for the UI. I've also tried RaspBMC and -I think- Xbian, openelec has the best UI response by a long way.
2) indexing problems: boot from nfs fixes that.
3) database size: boot from nfs also fixes that.

Re:Raspberry Pi...one day?

[NoZart]

Is the performance of the UI as smooth when you use "heavy" skins? Aeon MQ5 for instance, filled with HD background slideshows, movie metadata and so on... Just curious, as i am always interested in lowering my energy footprint....

Re:Raspberry Pi...one day?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much my experience. I bought the Pi more for messing around than for as media player, so I wasn't too disappointed.

I bought a couple of these and they're great little bits of kit for running XBMC front-end. I've also since built myself a machine using one of these - pretty similar price but quite a bit more capable than the Revoes. Either of these are worth looking into.

Re:Raspberry Pi...one day?

[bill_mcgonigle]

I have 3 of them in the house, I will be replacing them with real XBMC pc's shortly due to how fickle they are.

Same here. Some of my ffmpeg-created media files simply crashed the Pi's GPU (and no, Pi-ons, the latest firmware doesn't fix it). Every software player handles them fine, so over to XBMC on a core2 with an older nVidia card, and everything is great.

Re:Raspberry Pi...one day?

[Anonymous Coward]

So your idea of lowering your energy footprint is to load up the UI with a bunch of graphics intensive bullshit eye candy? If you want the ultimate minimal energy consumption but still have a minimal GUI, you use a black screen, no animations, and nothing but a list of files to play. All that extra bling and automation eats CPU cycles which eat power. But to answer you question, the Pi barely has what we call a video card. Don't stress it too much. 1080p60 h264 can bring it to a crawl sometimes. Other times it works fine. Either way though, it is never what you'd call snappy or swift. It squarely falls into the category of adequate/mediocre. It's cheap is about all it's got going for it. Whatever you think a Raspi can do, a Beaglebone Black will do it better.

You're right

[graffic]

I couldn't find anything better: http://elan.plexapp.com/2012/03/29/this-aint-your-grandfathers-dlna/

And unfortunately in that article I guess they're right :(

Each device implements DLNA in it's own way. Each DLNA tries to solve problems in the best way they can.

The best solutions I've seen is a: computer playing movies (VLC plays everything). Plex app + plex server in your NAS/PC.

No solution for you...

[Lumpy]

"making this work would take more hours than I'm prepared to spend."

There is no turn key no work involved media server out there. you can try a standard NAS and build yourself a XBMC playback box, but you can not buy one.
You will have to invest an entire weekend if you are a novice, or an entire saturday if you are an expert to do what you want. You had better prepare to spend some hours on this.

Re:No solution for you...

[Mr. Jackson]

As for a "Roku-style box", Roku is great and beautifully simple. Plex works seamlessly with Roku; it installs as a channel just like Netflix. Plex, as you learned, is not as simple but is does more - tradeoff. You can send videos from the web to Plex for watching on your TV with a click but that feature doesn't always work, depending on the site; works for youtube. The hardest thing about Plex for me was port forwarding but in the end I found I didn't need it. I think the only think I give up is sharing my media library with devices and other people.

Re:No solution for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

uhh... I bought a seagate goflex home 3TB device. I copy files to it. It serves them up to my tv... seems pretty turnkey to me.

Re:No solution for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are willing to spend some money, sure there are. Something like a small Synology NAS comes with a 'media server' (actual name) built-in which streams via DLNA. Add that to the aforementioned WD TV, and you're done.

You can perhaps spend less money and spend more time in configuration; or, more money and more time in configuration.

Re:No solution for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

you can try a standard NAS and build yourself a XBMC playback box, but you can not buy one.

I haven't tried it yet, so this is a stab in the dark, but I see plenty of Android boxes on eBay that have XBMC installed. The youtube reviews are OK so I'd suspect that with the Android Netflix app and XBMC running there's quite a lot of media player goodness to be had for less than £100 and not a lot of setup time.

Re:No solution for you...

[Mr D from 63]

Just in case some didn't know.....with Roku's newly updated Media Player Channel, you can play local network content from various DLNA servers. It even works with XBMC's upnp server. Of course, unlike PLEX or Serviio, XBMC doesn't transcode so you are limited to compatible content. But it does work as of the December Roku channel update.

Re:No solution for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple years ago when I had access to a free copy of Windows (no I didn't bootleg it) i decided to build a home theatre PC with Win7 and Windows Media Center. I pretty quickly installed MediaBrowser on top of WMC and that's been my media center of choice. It's far from perfect, but it generally just works. Oh, I did have to follow a few steps to enable playback of MKV files but that was pretty simple.

A few months ago, Windows crashed during an update and I couldn't recover at all. I thought that would be a great time to try XBMCUbuntu so I promptly downloaded it and installed. I was able to get it working, and found it nice that there are a lot of features and plug-ins, but the basic mechanics of using it are just inconvenient. For instance, in WMC when I'm in my movies library I can just start typing the name of a movie and the matching movies come up. In XBMC, I could not for the life of me find an easy way to get to a specific movie. Over the course of several days I tried to use it and configure different ways but it was more frustrating to use. In the end, I spent 3 hours to reinstall windows. I'd really like to move off WMC, but until something works better than the mediocre WMC experience, then I'm sticking to WMC.

Re:No solution for you...

[Anne_Nonymous]

It only took me twenty minutes to run XCDC over BSOD on a Y2K, and I'm a *total* noob.

Re:No solution for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't get more turnkey then those ASUSTOR NAS boxes
Comes with NAS functionality (Storage), has a HDMI port(Output to TV), and XBMC(Player/Server) is a supported app for simple click install

Re:No solution for you...

[realityimpaired]

I'd suggest you try a turnkey solution like Roku or a WDTV Live!.

Yes, I was using Windows Media Center for a while as well... I hadn't pirated it either (had a legal license), and it was ok. Especially if you installed the CCCP on it so it could play more types of files, but I find that a WDTV Live! uses a lot less electricity, and does basically the same thing, only better because it's a tool designed specifically for the task.

Re:No solution for you...

[Lumpy]

where do you buy a preconfigured PLEX server? because he does not want to spent any time at all building one.

Re:No solution for you...

[mu51c10rd]

That's not true. A WD TV Live box only needs to find the SMB shares on your network or any DLNA devices...and it will start compiling a media library for you. Bonus are the web apps for Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, etc.

Re: No solution for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

After my cleaning lady poured a bucket of water on my working and tweaked xbmc box I was spending a long time considering options. I found it really tedious to configure, right down to the noname remote. I found Openelec and gave it a try, and its fabulous. Everything apart from audio worked out of the box and even that only required copying a ready file to a folder on the automatically created samba mount.

Re:No solution for you...

[bill_mcgonigle]

where do you buy a preconfigured PLEX server? because he does not want to spent any time at all building one.

You call your local AV nerd ("integrator") and hire him to come set one up for you. Look for "Home Theatre Installers".

Re:No solution for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. WDTV Live *IS* turnkey. Plug it in, share on your network with a network drive or just a windows share on your windows box a folder with your videos and VOILA. It's that simple. No fancy setup, works with basically every codec there is (I've thrown tons at it and had no trouble whatsoever). It reads the subtitle files if they're there just like mediaplayer classic or VLC would, the thing works like an absolute champ, and is the first and only truly turn-key system for network-shared-media I've seen yet. Doesn't require a DLNA server like almost every other, it just reads directly the windows shared folders, and doesn't need to transcode or an intermediary because it uses it's own built-in codecs which it has configured for every format I've seen yet.

Re:No solution for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

Having to setup a DLNA server is hardly turnkey, I like Plex just fine but it's hardly perfect. network shares are however perfect and this is why the WDTV Live is the hands down best media player.

Re:No solution for you...

[Zynder]

A quick Google doesn't turn anything up but I'm sure my search terms are probably not correct cause there is some cloud company called Plex Systems out there hogging all the first couple pages. However, if you want a turn key OpenELEC XBMC system see Here

Re:DLNA

[michrech]

It's interesting that you're so negative toward Plex and XBMC. My brother and a friend of his use XBMC with zero issues (even their wives, who aren't terribly computer literate, have no problems using it), and they've not run into any media it won't play. I have similar experience with Plex (and have been trying to get them to convert).

In my case, I've only thrown .mkv files at Plex, since that's the container all the pirates seem to use for movies (I have no idea why, and I've not bothered to look into it). I've never had issues with playback on my HTPC (which has Plex Home Theater), my phone and tablet, both of which have the Android Plex app, or to my work PC via the Plex Media Server web interface. It even supports subtitles, if their built into the file (I've never tried downloading/adding them manually, so I don't know 1) if it works and 2) how difficult a process it is).

What kind of problems have you had with Plex (don't worry -- beyond being a user, I'm not affiliated with the company -- I'm just curious)?

Mediatomb

[CapeBretonIslander]

I use Mediatomb from my Linux Mint box. If I recall correctly, I had to edit a conf file to get it to work with my PS3, but I don't think it was too involved to set up.

Re:Mediatomb

[queBurro]

just to throw this into the mix but I've got mediatomb running on my flashed asus router, it's available as a binary package via ipkg IIRC. The benefit is that you can use a bit of "always on kit" to do your media serving too without running a separate PC to do the job.

Re:Mediatomb

[Anne Thwacks]

I run Mediatomb too. Works Great with my 40" Samsung TV, and various Android things: Nexus, Samsung, etc. Using it as I type this.

Re:Mediatomb

[Anonymous Coward]

Mediatomb will feed most files to PS3 by default. You may have to add some changes to transcode formats not handled by the PS3. I think they are even there already now and commented out. If not, very easy to find. I just setup mediatomb two weeks ago.

FreeNAS

[sasquatch989]

I use it for all my files, media or otherwise. I can go on and on but this works for me. Run it as a VM if you have no extra hardware layin around.

Server or client?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Linux PC running Linux sitting in a rack in the basement. I have mini-PC's (Intel NUC and mini-ITX) attached behind my TV sets. The media server is running Mediatomb and is also sharing the media files using NFS and Samba. The mini-PC's clients are running XBMC. The media can be played on our PC's, phones, and tablets as well.

The only thing I miss is somewhat better embedded browser support in XBMC. In my living room I was forced to run Windows in order to get Silverlight content (streaming from local broadcast and Netflix), eve though that Silverlight support has improved under Linux with Limelight (which I have not yet tested).

My setup

[ihtoit]

Backend: commodity Pentium 4 2.6GHz PC (that I was given) with 2TB RAID & laptop with XBMC and 11TB USB storage->Softmodded XBox Crystal Rev. 1.1, 20GB HDD (£15 at good gaming stores), XBMC->TV

Re:My setup

[Danathar]

And you can transcode on the fly a 1080p video + stream it using a Pentium 4?

Re:My setup

[ihtoit]

not that the XBox can actually decode a 1080p stream (being an SD box via SCART), but... no. Just tried it. It'll do a buffered transcode, but not live streaming. Can a Raspberry Pi do it? I would think not being a 700MHz single core. Please don't throw out challenges that you know damn well can't be fulfilled with common gear (and no, a 2.4 quad core is NOT common gear).

Re:My setup

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you don't mind the power bills due to excessive power consumption!!!

Re:My setup

[jabuzz]

The Raspberry Pi has hardware decoders for H264 out the box and for the grand sum of 2.40GBP you can buy an MPEG2 license key to enable hardware decoding of MPEG2. For half that again you can also buy a VC-1 license key.

The fact that the main CPU is a 700MHz single core is rather besides the point. My Toshiba Tecra 780DVD with a Mobile Pentium II at 266MHz was/is able to play back DVD's full screen without missing a beat due to the hardware MPEG2 decoder.

Re:My setup

[Anonymous Coward]

OOOOOO, You're sooooo strong!! Not everyone can just rip up goalposts and shove them back in the ground like you can!

Re:My setup

[ihtoit]

DVDs are 720p not 1080p. And that's provided it's original qHD material; transfer (from cine or from VHS) is done at 360p. So "My cock is bigger" fail.

By the way, I have a 266MHz Dell CPt that can play DVDs and that DOESN'T have a hardware decoder.

Twonky is a good bet

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using Twonky for 2 years now and its the best media server that I have come across. It has compatibility with every TV / OS out there. It is available for not only Linux/Windows but also has versions for consumer NAS like the DLink and WD products mentioned elsewhere on this thread.

You can buy for PC or you can download one of the following builds for NAS (I've been using DLink version). It transcodes on the fly according to connecting devices as well.
http://www.twonkyforum.com/downloads/7.2.1/

NFS, MOCP and Mplayer

[anvaendarnamn]

Have a small epia-board always running with a couple of disks attached, this is also my music player for main sound system using MOCP. All other machines mount what they need over NFS. Disks not in use power down and the system runs from a small SSD so average consumption is under 10W. Tried XBMC, Myth and some other stuff but it was all too complicated. (although I should say that I'm not using TV, could be that it's easier to use some mediadistro for that.)

Synology DS213

[Anonymous Coward]

DNLA/Media Server/Raid/Bittorrent/ scheduled backups/low power/easy interface/ apps for Android and iPad/

There's a whole category of boxes like this, no need to reinvent the wheel, just go buy one and use it.

This works for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a simple Asrock PC as mediabox. It is low spec, but runs really quiet and have hardware acceleration for HD-video. On this I run the pretty light weight xubuntu LTS. On top of this I run XBMC. XBMC is set to start on power-on, so the other users in my house don't even see the Linux in bottom of the system.
XBMC have a quite simple UI that let you browse and play almost any file format from almost any storage media. If you have downloaded media it even plays stacks of rar and zip archives without the need to unpack them first. XBMC is also extendable with apps and I think there is a browser/player for BBC content. The only thing a little painful is getting Netflix running. I haven't botherd and do this from a normal browser instead.
The system can play content stored locally, from USB-devices, or as I do, from a NAS-disk on my house network (and most other thinkable solution).
Good luck!

virtualbox and openELEC!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a ASUS AT3ionT mainboard. it's 14cm x 14cm. it's got a intel atom 330 and nvidia ion gpu (14watt).
the power-supply is a brick like a laptop, so no extra bulky PSU (PowerSupplyUnit) needed.
this is connected via HDMI to the TV and via GIGAbit ethernet to the LAN. it has no usb-flash disk or harddisk attached.

On another computer i have Virtualbox. Inside that lives a smallish Linux with tftp server, dhcp (dnsmasq) server and a NFS server (wikipedia:Preboot Execution Environment)
The tftp and dnsmasq is setup so that they serve openELEC (www.openelec.tv) to the harddisk-less asus mainboard.
The nice thing is that i can copy the virtualmachine to any computer with virtualbox (osx, winblows, linux) and that computer then will be
the "openELEC" serving server.
of course there is also a NAS that holds the acctual media files (this is configured in openELEC once it has net.booted).

don't buy "toys". buy a real computer. they come in all sizes and shapes. raspi is a real computer. netgear "toys" are not. appleTV is inbetween if prison-freed. also you can use ANY computer that can boot from the built-in network card and has an approriate built from openELEC. just plugin and netboot and voila openELEC : ).
maybe some day the cpu+gpu+memory inside the TVs will be enough so we don't need a extra mainboard and the TV itself can netboot :) happy tinkering.

miniDLNA

[EmagGeek]

Works great.

great question

[Kaitiff]

I too was looking around at different solutions. I have Serviio working on an old XP box, but silly me I wanted to get moved to something a little more stable and permanent. A friend donated an XP Media Center PC that's a few years old, so I tried 2 or 3 different Linux media players, and all failed. XBMCbuntu looked like a great idea until I found out that it simply will NOT work on a machine using an ATI video card, which I have. Was excited to try LINHec, found out that it will only run on a machine that has X64 capable process which (thanks Intel) the processor in my little media center pc will NOT do. I had seen PS3 media player but really? I don't HAVE and never will have a PS3, seems to me that with the name it's pretty specifically not for me. The sad part is it was a simple install on XP that was a literal no brainer and a task worthy of the labors of Hercules for Linux. Oh well.

Samba

[mikelieman]

Just expose the directory as a "Windows Share" and any client on the network should be able to see it.

Re:Samba

[borl]

If minimum fuss is the requirement, this is the solution.

Patriot Box Office 1080p Media Player

[Lightjumper]

I have used WD live (or was mine a WD tv?) units and love them, have have not used them in a couple years and can’t remember if they even had a Ethernet port on mine. I reach for my Patriot Box Office 1080p High-Definition Media Player PCMPBO25 all the time now. The Patriot will connect right to my Linux Samba server and allow me to map drives to windows share, etc. You can also install a HDD inside the unit or an external bluray player/drive. It will seems to play anything. I have noticed some .m4v files have sound issues (No sound) as when I created the mk4 file I used AC3 Passthru or DTS Passthru and not sure why they don’t work. but work fine on my pc. The videos play fine. I had to rerun handbrake and use AC3 (faac or ffmeg) codec setting and then sound was fine. It could just be my cheap receiver having issues. Only issue I’ve seen is the lack of updates. I don’t think I’ve seen an update in over a year or 2 now.. I have had the unit maybe 3 or so years also..

Plex on the back end XBMC on the front end(s)

[complete loony]

With sickbeard and couchpotato to rename the media nicely into folders and download meta-data. Be careful with those though. If there are two files they think are the same, they'll delete one without warning.

Media server isn't the problem, the player?

[AbRASiON]

What's a good PLAYER?
I use XBMC on a fairly basic HTPC I love it but what's the best solution to buy friends and family so they can have XBMC? I don't want to administer a HTPC.

The Apple TV2 I tried, it's got NO balls, it runs XBMC like shit, the remote is garbage and it's laggy with an even remotely decent sized collection. Hell there's 8gb of flash on there and if you've got a mammoth collection you may actually end up filling the disk with the thumbnails.

Those WDTV devices aren't bad for the price but it's no XBMC.

People responding with "Rasberry Pi" are tinkerers and not actual extensive XBMC users. You're going to see the same problems as the Apple TV2 (only worse)

Re:Media server isn't the problem, the player?

[nite-]

Plex Media Server for the backend and Roku 3 players.

Re:Media server isn't the problem, the player?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo! Same as me. Plex back-end (Plex Server on an 1st gen Eee PC) and Roku 3 on front end.

Works great for things that can be "Direct Played" by Roku through the Plex App, trans-coding (unless its only audio) on the fly is assish. But that's understandable given the Eee PC is not a beast in the processor department and has (or doesn't at all) a puny gpu.

I've done it all and still have a mini-tower under the TV with XBMC (scanning the Plex server) for those times when I absolutely have to watch something in HD or play an emulated game or watch a show on the web.

Plex Server (newest version, stable) also functions as a DLNA server so all your DLNA devices will be able to play stuff from the server. Tested this too with my phone. But given that DLNA is a suggestion type standard I wouldn't rely on it for a good and impressive experience.

BTW: The Roku 3 is chromecast compatible, I haven't heard anyone mention this nor did I know this when I bought it but it works. I can chromecast from all the devices that I own (phones/tablets) that have official google apps.

Miro

[captjc]

Miro is a free Cross Platform media manager and has built-in library streaming and video converter. Just put in RSS feeds or have it monitor folders.

http://www.getmiro.com/

Jriver?

[ravenswood1000]

I like it. Maybe it would do what you need.

Raspberry pi

[Anonymous Coward]

Raspbmc

Mezzmo

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried several of the tools mentioned in this topic (Serviio, XBMC, PS3 Media Server), and eventually settled for the best one, which in my opinion is Mezzmo.
I have been using it at least for 2 years, streaming any kind of file to my Samsung LED TV via DLNA, i works like a charm.

OpenELEC (custom dist + xbmc)

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenELEC packages XBMC into a custom distribution that is optimized for fast startup.

Client capabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have the answers - either Plex or Serviio will be fine, but neither is completely configuration free. Serviio seems closest for you, but you need to tell it what your player will support in terms of media playback. It comes with standard profiles for common DLNA renderers (various Smart TVs, media centres, Blu-Ray players), but not (from last time I looked) for your particualr client. It will probably therefore fall abck on the default which doesn't seem to work for your client for mkv files. There is no inherent limitation in the server for mkvs - it works for me on my Sony Blu-Ray - but if it thinks your player does not need them transcoding then playback will fail if it can't handle them natively. The Serviio forums / documentation can tell you how to set up a profile: it's not trivial, but to a Slashdot user shouldn't present a problem.

Simple Cheap Solution

[desman]

Get ViMu for your device. http://www.vimuplayer.com/ I don't know if it works with Netgear NeoTV Max, but I use on a Logitech Revue and it works great. Plex used way to much resources. ViMu uses almost no resources on your PC other than to read your media, no resource intensive transcoding - all the work is done on the device's (in my case the Logitech Revue) native hardware. It is very simple to setup and works great. It doesn't have all the fancy bells and whistles of Plex, but it supports different sound tracks and subtitles very well.

OpenElec

[Anonymous Coward]

People are recommending XBMC here, but are totally forgetting OpenElec. For those of you new to that, OpenElec is a stripped down version of linux (about 100 MB) with XBMC integrated. Superbly stable, boots in seconds on non-ssd hardware and supports a slew of hardware, remotes and whatnot. It's freaking sliced bread for people trying to have a device run like a dedicated media center without faffing about.

Having said that, it does suffer, naturally from the same problems XBMC suffers (because it IS XBMC). Like poor netflix support. (although that problem may also be history I just found out: http://lifehacker.com/netflixbmc-brings-a-better-remote-controlled-netflix-t-1484237283)

UPnP Rygel

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Rygel and it works very well. Install the Rygel preferences and it's a no brainer. For movies...typically, I have found, if you want the subtitles to work, they need to be in the same directory as the movie. I've had the most luck deleting whatever subtitles come with the downloaded movie and using Subdownloader to add them. It uses OpenSubtitles.

iTunes and Apple TV

[Anonymous Coward]

I've built several systems to do just what the OP wanted and was never really satisfied with the quality of the product, then I was given a free Apple TV, so I played with Airplay and iTunes and got it working very easily.

I've since purchased 2 more Apple TVs for other rooms in my home.

It turned out to be the easiest way for doing what I wanted, and the interface has a professional look and feel that I don't think other solutions gave me. Now that it's set up, all I do is drag media (only pre-req is movies have to be run through Handbrake first) over to iTunes, perhaps change the media type to "movie" instead of "home movie", and I'm done.

Yeah, I've traded off my geek cred by using Apple and will probably be modded down by the anti-apple crowd, but I found this to be the best solution to the challenge outlined in the OP, so I'm sharing.

Re:iTunes and Apple TV

[frinkster]

I've built several systems to do just what the OP wanted and was never really satisfied with the quality of the product, then I was given a free Apple TV, so I played with Airplay and iTunes and got it working very easily.

I've since purchased 2 more Apple TVs for other rooms in my home.

It turned out to be the easiest way for doing what I wanted, and the interface has a professional look and feel that I don't think other solutions gave me. Now that it's set up, all I do is drag media (only pre-req is movies have to be run through Handbrake first) over to iTunes, perhaps change the media type to "movie" instead of "home movie", and I'm done.

Yeah, I've traded off my geek cred by using Apple and will probably be modded down by the anti-apple crowd, but I found this to be the best solution to the challenge outlined in the OP, so I'm sharing.

Many years ago I tired of the frustration of getting a Linux-based solution to work well. Not just working, but working well - easy, looked nice, not having to reconfigure everything any time a library/software update on the Ubuntu box occurred, etc. I bought the 2nd gen Apple TV and have never looked back.

I fully believe that today there must be other solutions that work well, but I'm happy enough with the Apple TV that it's not worth the time trying anything else. There is no need to feel that you are trading in geek cred - you have a solution that works and it gives you the time to tackle other geeky problems.

Re:iTunes and Apple TV

[Anonymous Coward]

So reincodnig everything to a format apple allows you to use, chaging the media type, and streaming from another computer running itunes is easier then XBMC?
Heck, jailbreak your ATV2 and get XBMC on it and skip the computationally intense and time wasting handbrake conversion.

Started out doing what you do, and moved away once the library grew and became frustrating to reincode, upate the type, fix the metadata (name, series, episode, etc). On a flip side, look at Meta-X to help with the metadata for your MP4's.

NOTE: I have two ATV1's and two ATV2's.
The ATV1's run OpenElec, the ATV2's are jailbroken.

Re:iTunes and Apple TV

[captjc]

Unless you are transcoding DVDs or pirating videos from the internet, h.264 / MP4 is more or less the current standard for internet videos. If you are ripping DVD / Blu-Rays, unless you are planning on watching them very soon, you're going to need to transcode them anyway if only to bring them down to a manageable size (besides, Handbrake uses h.264)

Started out doing what you do, and moved away once the library grew and became frustrating to reincode, upate the type, fix the metadata (name, series, episode, etc). On a flip side, look at Meta-X to help with the metadata for your MP4's.

What the hell are you doing? Once the video is ripped, it's done. Copy it to an external drive or burn it to a DVD. Just give it a name like "001 - Episode Name" and be done with it. Most media players will read the filename as the video name. No fucking around with metadata required. If you really need to get specific try naming it like "Show Name 001 - Episode Name"

Re:No SINGLE solution for you...

[ITMagic]

It's a big question, and I don't feel that there is a single answer. But this is what I did...

I bought a Raspberry Pi, stuck XBMC on it, and am quite happy with it. However, what I did was wrong (at least, the approach was). However, I did it that way because I already had a Pi for other reasons, was playing with it, and I am a cheapskate that doesn't like buying hardware!

What you should do is decide what software you want to run, and your competency level of installing and maintaining it - and then buy the hardware to match.

I *really* wanted a simple DNLA Digital Media Renderer (DMR), rather than a DMC. Personally, I've never really liked GUI's, and wanted a simple backend just to play what was streamed to it. However, in the end, I could not find what I wanted, and developed an opinion that DNLA is a mish-mash of ideals that don't completely work in practice. So I gave up on that thread.

Had a brief encounter with the Apple TV. Didn't like it at all - not what I was looking for. The other retail consumer devices I had problems discovering that they wouldn't cope with all the potential formats I had, or wouldn't do what I wanted, or (more commonly) that I couldn't discover exactly what they were capable of anyway. I don't like locked-down platforms.

So I ended up with XBMC. It feels (to me) a bit bloated. Why would I need to view the weather on my TV? Or photographs? Etc... But the rest of the community seem to think that it isn't half bad, so that is good enough. But importantly, it works! I watch TV on a TV, not on the iPad (though the wife does) - and XBMC streams to it quite happily (so long as the format is correct - I've not bothered to look at streaming any .mkv files or transcoding options. And, if I feel the need, I can stream from the iPad to the TV (not that I do). Additionally, there is a very useful iPad/iPhone remote control app. It is my primary method of controlling it.

The annoyance (for me) is that I still need a keyboard plugged in to the Pi. It's not used much, and the plan is to ditch it completely, but I'm still tinkering with it. Also, I haven't got it to download TV schedules, or watch on-demand content from the web, or watch live broadcast TV, or act as a PVR, etc, etc. But that really isn't important to me. It may be for you...

Simple

[nightsky30]

Plex was highly recommended, and installed easily, but will see some .mkv files, but not others, for no obvious reason

MKV is a container. It surrounds whatever codec happens to be inside of it. You could very easily use a tool like gspot to analyze the file for the inner codec, and add the required packages/libraries to open and play said file. I don't think that's a limitation of Plex, but a lack of required codec software packages on your machine. I've heard wonderful things about Plex.

Re:Simple

[nightsky30]

MediaInfo appears to be a friendlier alternative which also supports Windows/Linux/Mac.

XBMC is your only man ...

[warren.oates]

As far as i'm concerned, XBMC is pretty much the only way to go here. I keep my media files (Movies, TV, Music) on a terabyte drive in my first generation Mac Pro and samba share them gigabit to a Zotac id41 running Openelec. Openelec is an appliance-like Linux distribution that installs quickly and does nothing other than run XBMC (there's no "desktop" except XBMC; you can control it via ssh). I tried Serviio, and a couple of streaming servers, but they don't always understand what a file is supposed to do and choke on it. Samba just shares files and lets the remote machine figure them out. XBMC figures everything out that I've sent it so far; it has a host of plug-ins (what they call "add ons") including one for the BBC iPlayer, and for the ITV player, and for Hulu and you can even control rtorrent from one of them. For the Beeb and ITV I use Witopia's VPN service which can be invoked from Openelec's command line if you know what you're about. Plays 1080p nicely on my 50", all sorts of 5.1 audio goes through a semi-decent Pioneer amp. Openelec is not for dedicated Linux tinkerers. I set the Zotac up originally with Arch Linux because, you know, "I'm a geek, uh huh, uh huh" and it was a huge mistake because I was updating the damned thing every 20 minutes the way Arch people do, and I put a desktop on it and installed browsers and so forth thinking that I'd have a neat fully blown computer there in my living room and I could surf and check my email -- fahgeddaboudit! It's an HTPC only these days, plays music and video. Those Zotacs are powerful little machines though. I have a friend in town does the same thing with a Pi.

XBMC

[BlackHawk-666]

My media lives on a WD MyBook Live 3TB drive which is basically a Power PC Linux box and hard drive all in one. It comes with a single network connector. Plug it in, use it's web interface to configure a couple of things and you have a very elegant DLNA sever that will happily also serve up SAMBA as well. I SSHed into mine and added Transmission to it, so now it also downloads all my torrents for me.

For the front end I use a pair of boxes, one for my room, one for the lounge. My room runs off my main PC running a copy of XBMC on Windows 7. BluMote connects over blutooth to my PS3 remote controller which allows me to completely control XBMC from the comfort of my couch. In the lounge I wanted something really simple, cheap, but still powerful for the other family members.

The solution was to buy an Ouya console (about $100) and sideload XBMC onto it. It uses SAMBA shares on the WD drive to access the central media server(s). it can play anything you are ever likely to download. It looks and works great and was piss easy to install and configure. It has a range of plugins, including one that allows me to control the torrent downloads on the WD hard drive. Youtube and all the other services are also there - though, caveat, a lot of those sort of plugins are flaky or don't quite work yet on the Ouya. If I had the spare cash I'd grab another Ouya for downstairs (my area) and use XBMC on that instead of my PC to lower my power usage.

I also have an Apple TV 3 - which is never used anymore. It required me to run iTunes on my PC just so I could playback my media. It needed everything converted into MP4 format and the absolute kick in the face - couldn't handle subtitles.

XBMC plays everything, works great, runs on low power Linux boxes, left over PCs, or your main PC. Ditch that half arsed player you bought and either slap together some parts for an XMBC box or grab an Ouya and sideload it (still some stability issues on that).

Re:Media Server?

[Mr D from 63]

XBMC is an awesome Media Player. It is also a decent Media Server. Distinguishing between the two is key to getting the right solution. If you have XBMC on your end device (player), and if your media files are accessible via the home network, then you don't need a media server. However, you may want one if you have other devices you want to use to access that medai (tablets, Roku, etc).

As for Netflix, just go ahead and use a dedicated device such as a Roku or a Bluray player with apps. You won't get a good Netflix experience with XBMC (kludged for NF), or most other media player softwares. Don't waste time trying to find it. Closest thing would be a WD LIVE.

In the end, if you want it pretty and functional, you'll need to put some work into it. "It just works" often means "it barely works to my needs". Music libraries require meticulous tagging. Movie libraries should be organized with Media Center Master or similar (or XBMC can do it for you as well). Use MCM and setup of PLEX or other servers can be much easier.

Some will recommend Raspberry Pi as a player. It can work but it can be very fidgety & might struggle with some HD content. Better with spending more on a capable hardware if you are adding a player. (Intel NUC 847 with OpenELEC installed is a low cost, strong option).

Final word. DLNA works but is clumsy. Look for non-DLNA solutions.

Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

WDTV Live with an attached USB drive.

I have this with a 2TB drive. Works great, cheap.

No, it's not networked but its simple.

Synology

[DrXym]

Just buy a NAS from Synology and be done with it. It's simple to set up, has an attractive web front end and supports DLNA, SMB and other ways you might want to stream content.

Re:Synology

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that. I have a 410j which has been running in my basement for about 4 years now.

I have 4 3TB drives in raid 5 on it. I started with 4 1.5TB and the thing was smart enough to not only rebuild the raid but when all 4 drives were replaced, increase its size automagically. Also, the raid 5 is recognized by windows (and I'm sure linux too but I've not tried that) which is a good thing if this box ever fails.

Comes with a ton of plugins too.

XBMC + raspberry pi

[Anonymous Coward]

I run XBMC on a raspberry Pi which mounts some ntfs partitions and ssh partitions to connect to networked devices.
It plays anything I throw at it and works wonderfully with subtitles.

It's easy to set up (download image + write to sd card) and easy to manage (I use my tv remote, no extra setup needed to make this work).

Painless and awesome

Disclaimer: I have no connection with either project but am a very big fan of this low-cost, low-power, just-works solution!

Try MiniDLNA

[treczoks]

It runs like a charm on my server (Dell PowerEdge 860, 2x1TB, SuSE Linux). Client is a Samsung TV and BD player.

RPi with XBMC

[Enry]

I have a server in the basement with all the media files (DVDs and BluRays that I own) and I use XBMC on a few Raspberry Pi devices around the house to organize and play.

Get an android dongle

[tanveer1979]

http://www.rikomagic.com/en/index.html

Lots of options.
Basically, it attaches to your TV android port. You can run any media server like xbmc etc., or whatever.
You can go online, use an app to view videos, or simply use network file system.... Possibilities are endless

I'm doing well with Plex.

[RoboJ1M]

I recommend Plex (I know I know, I read the question)

I have an Ubuntu 12.04 box running that.

Don't generally have any problems with it.

I did have an MKV problem where some encoding option caused it to barf but that was with DLNA clients and the transcoder.

And it does have the advantage that you can get paid support for it at a very reasonable price.

The MKV files that are missing, are they missing on the PMS or just missing in the client?
And is the client DLNA or the native Plex client?

Also, if you have a Samsung smart device you can install the native plex client on there.

I have also had success with the following servers:

miniDLNA (only used for music on an RPi on a boat though)
Serviio (superior DLNA transcoding)
XBMCs built in server (seems to work well)

Re:DLNA

[Mr D from 63]

Really? While some folks have a few problems installing XBMC just like any software, for the most part it works without a hitch. I have installed XBMC on multiple windows machines, and Ubuntu machine, and multiple OpenELEC installations. The only time it didn't "just work" was a Rasberry-Pi. And in that case it was working correctly with a little settings manipulation.

I can't speak for PLEX, but I rarely see significant problems on the forums related to simple setup, and they have a huge user base.

MediaPortal

[Simulant]

I mostly play downloaded video and while MediaPortal is aimed at the DVR crowd, I've found that it's been able to play most everything I download far more consistently than the competition. Also it doesn't try to index every media file you own (though the option is available) which in my experience causes many problems if you have a lot of files with inconsistent naming conventions. MediaPortal lets you simply browse your file system with a MCE Remote, select a file, and play it. It's 100% free and I've been using it for 10 years. Support is continuous and ongoing. I check out the competition every year or so but always return to MediaPortal, so far. In the extremely rare cases when a file doesn't play correctly, it's simple enough to flip over to VLC.... but I probably do this only a few times a year.

Re:MediaPortal

[Simulant]

... I'd like to add that I don't use the TV Server functionality of Media Portal at all. Just the client. My video is stored on a windows server which is simply sharing video folders via SMB, My MPC box is just a PC running Windows 7 and Mediaportal, pointed at the server's SMB shares. You could just as easily keep your video on the MPC box. Takes about 20 minutes to setup and configure from scratch, assuming you have Windows already installed. It's much easier these days as they now include a very complete (or at least complete enough for the vast majority of releases these days) codec package in the install.

easy file renaming

[Anonymous Coward]

I use filebot to rename my downloaded media to a more Plex friendly format. It is wicked easy.

I know your pain - AKA don't be lazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't turn away from Plex - if you fix it you will find non techy folk can pick up the front end of it much easier. It also works on far more devices than XBMC. You can get a NOWTV box in the UK for £10 and sideload Plex on it. Bargain!

Plex on Linux can't read NTFS and various other things - you have to fstab the drives. Some MKVs not working? I'm not joking, try giving file full read write perms.

Eventually I moved back to Windows Server (which to rub it in does all Server tasks slowly and much worse than Linux) mainly as Plex works just as well as on Linux but I could also tune multiple TV cards (which should work in Linux but... well... didn't)

21st century consumerism

[Gothmolly]

Submission translated: "I'm hopelessly addicted to consuming content, can you help me set something up so that I can consume more?"

Jesus, go outside once in a while, nail your wife, read a book, plant a garden... there's more things out there than digital media and how many different codecs and devices you consume it with.

Twonky

[BringsApples]

Have you looked into Twonky? It's what I use. Works exactly how you'd want.

I would stick with Plex

[PsyMan]

I have only ever had a few MKV's that made Plex hiccup but that was down to corrupt files. I do get a lot of files it misses but thats purely down to misnaming them. If you are happy to put yet another overpowered machine under your TV then XBMC is great but from a convenience point of view, get used to naming your files and use plex. I have a small 6Tb centos box feeding 2 Roku's, 3 PC's 2 Android devices, my macbook (even when working away with no additional configuration) and 5 friends with Rokus and Samsung smart TV's. It can take a little hands on to keep the Library in check but a good bulk renamer and some common sense soon has it all in order. I think that XBMC is great for the same people who would rather use an old PC with a few network cards in them to roll their own router/firewall over using a small power efficient router with a flashed firmware. Its good but not entirely scalable throughout the house without a lot of MySQL and config tweaking. Stick with Plex is my vote.

Linkstation + uShare

[asylumx]

I picked up a 1TB Buffalo Linkstation. It already runs a flavor of linux that you can telnet into fairly easily. You can then install something like uShare on it which is a DLNA server. It works well for me, I have a TV that can connect via DLNA or I can also connect via the PS3 or the XBox 360. Note that the PS4 and XBoxOne don't support DLNA even though their previous editions did.

Re:Linkstation + uShare

[asylumx]

I should have paid more attention to the summary. My solution does not work right out of the box, but it does work with only an hour or two of setup if you know your way around google (looking for how others did it).

OpenELEC front end, SMB/CIFS/NFS server back-end

[chill]

I have a set-up where all my media files are stored on a generic Linux file server running Samba for CIFS/SMB and exporting NFS shares. This can be any old box you have laying around, and yes, the Raspberry Pi can do this fine.

My televisions have small boxes mounted via VESA-mount adapters on the back of them. 2 are Raspberry Pis, 1 is a Zotac Z-Box. Two are wired, one is wireless, all have power and HDMI cables. All run OpenELEC as a front end and I use Yatse on my Android phone as a remote.

The downsides are you can't integrate Netflix into OpenELEC (which is really just a skinned, slimmed XBMC) because of lack of DRM support on Linux. I haven't checked on Amazon Prime video or Hulu Plus video support lately. I know it was working before with the BlueCop repository of add-ons.

BoxeeBox

[Anonymous Coward]

Might be discontinued, but I have yet to find anything that works better. It also supports the other comments here about XBMC as it runs a derivative of it IIRC. I throw .avi, .mov, .mkv, etc and no problems. Full high-def, no problem. DTS, etc, no problem. Optical out, composite out, HDMI out, wifi, ethernet, SD card, USB You can find plenty of them on eBay, usually under $100. I am terribly mad that the product line got discontinued (I believe it got bought out by Samsung, shocker). I picked up a Roku3 to test it and it only works with H.264 streams and is not as slick when it comes to pointing it at my NAS drive. Get the BoxeeBox, toss a NTFS USB drive on it, and off you go -- if you have a network directory, then point it at it and it will scan and go. If it does not recognize a title, you can go in and manually reconcile them and they will appear in the main media catalog. Most of the time I just navigate straight through the file browser since I know what I'm after...

Re:BoxeeBox

[Cigamit]

Also, for those people that want pure XBMC instead of Boxee's version, we have gotten XBMC compiled and running on the Boxee box too.

FreeNAS

[Anonymous Coward]

I use FreeNAS at home with MiniDLNA, the downside is MiniDLNA has refresh problems, you need lots of RAM, and if you don't want your data corrupted, you need ECC. All that aside, it's damn good and is very consistent. I can stream to both my Ubuntu netbook over NFS share, backup data for Windows on a CIFS share and stream to my PS3 on MiniDLNA.

I tried using Plex, but they require you to rename your files to an accepted convention or they won't list them in your media directories. I get that they want you to use the metadata feature that looks up info about your media online, but it's *idiotic* that your files won't show up at all unless you rename them.

I also tried using the built-in Plex website for transcoding video and watching it over the internet. Plex wasn't able to deliver my video well at all over a slow connection (even with the downsampling settings at minimum). It kept buffering the video infinitely after a few seconds and it would only play audio.

Actually there is...

[Danathar]

And it's to pay somebody else to build your media server for you.

You say you can not buy one.

Hogwash. I'm sure if you had the money you could find a computer savy nerd to build you an XBMC server solution for your home.

That being said, Roku + Plex pretty much does everything.

Re:Actually there is...

[Lumpy]

I say more hogwash.

Go to best buy and buy one. Because that is what 99% of the people out there are capable of. If it doesn't exist at best buy, then it doesn't exist for them.

Re:Actually there is...

[Zynder]

Forget my reply to you above. I thought you were asking a serious question but I see now you're just grinding axes. Even if we linked you a turnkey system from Best Buy, I doubt you'd be happy with it, cause for whatever reason, you've already made your mind up regarding this subject.

Best solution is a mini itx system

[Anonymous Coward]

ThinkPenguin's got a really nice box that works really well. I've got one hooked up in my bedroom. It's really small and powerful box. It's a full fledged system with Ubuntu (although I'm sure Linux Mint would work just fine as the system itself is free software friendly) unlike most others. Of course that also means it comes at a cost. But it's well worth it if you ask me.

I would suggest combining the system with a Logitech k400r wireless keyboard. It's a smaller wireless small with touchpad that works really really well.

Zyxel NSA310 NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

£50, inc drive.
SMB, DLNA and FTP servers. Simple to setup, works with Android, OSX, iOS, Windows - even the picky DLNA support in my Samsung TV (2 year old) works fine with in. And it' cheap. And you don't have to muck about with it if all you want is a simple media server. And if you really feel the need to muck about, you can get root access and install Plex - but the point is you don't have to.

Agreed, XBMC. Your "server" can be NFS or Samba

[langelgjm]

I run XBMC on an Apple TV first generation, upgraded to include a 1080p hardware decoder card. Everything streams from my server, using simple file sharing mechanisms like NFS or Samba. Occasionally I copy a file to its hard drive so that I can take the AppleTV with me to a friend's house. It's small, the UI is polished, and it handle almost everything.

For Netflix, I have a Sony Bluray player with built in applications (Netflix, Pandora and Youtube are the only ones I regularly use. It also has Hulu Plus and Amazon Video). I bought this $100 player and a dumb TV instead of a smart TV. It also has DLNA support, and I run minidlna on the server, sharing the same media files as with the XBMC Apple TV client. Sony's interface is not nearly as polished as XBMC, but occasionally I will run across a file that doesn't cooperate with XBMC, at which point I can switch over to the Sony.

Bottom line - if your device doesn't support standard sharing mechanisms (either file sharing protocols or DLNA, etc.) it's probably not worth the trouble to mess with. Sell it and get something else.

I have a Chromecast that I use strictly for Netflix and Pandora. If I wanted to stream local media to it, I'd sell it and buy something else.

Re:Agreed, XBMC. Your "server" can be NFS or Samba

[operagost]

I also have a Sony BluRay player, and I tried to use it in a pure DLNA environment with Serviio as the DLNA server and BubbleUPnP as the controller. Sony's DLNA player just likes to fail in the middle of my playlist all the time, so I'm probably going to have to go with XBMC on the Windows server instead of Serviio and the Sony.

Re:Agreed, XBMC. Your "server" can be NFS or Samba

[Grishnakh]

For Netflix, I have a Sony Bluray player with built in applications (Netflix, Pandora and Youtube are the only ones I regularly use. It also has Hulu Plus and Amazon Video). I bought this $100 player and a dumb TV instead of a smart TV. It also has DLNA support, and I run minidlna on the server, sharing the same media files as with the XBMC Apple TV client. Sony's interface is not nearly as polished as XBMC, but occasionally I will run across a file that doesn't cooperate with XBMC, at which point I can switch over to the Sony.

I have one of these Sony players to. It's a total piece of shit. It frequently locks up, starting up Netflix usually takes three tries (the first time it says the network is down, the second time it just dies and goes back to the home screen, the third time it works usually), it plays from USB sticks but is incredibly picky about what it'll play. It won't play .avi files, but if I rename them to .m4v, then they'll usually play. It's very hit-and-miss with .mkv files; some work, others don't. Frequently when playing .mkv files, it'll crash back to the home screen for no apparent reason in the middle of a movie, and I'll have to manually try to fast-forward to the spot where it crashed. Back to that .avi/.m4v problem; when I first got it, it was like that, but then they did an automatic firmware update and it could play .avi files without renaming. But later, they did another automatic update and it went back to not recognizing .avi files. Of course, there's zero control over the firmware updating so you can't stick with an older version if you want. Fuck that player; the only reason I still use it is I haven't bothered to look for a replacement, and have no faith that any competing Blu-Ray player (with similar capabilities) would be any better. An open-source player like MythTV would be great, except that Netflix support is my #1 requirement.

Re:Agreed, XBMC. Your "server" can be NFS or Samba

[langelgjm]

It is a bit buggy. I usually have to open Netflix twice in order to get it to start. Occasionally it will lose my login information for Netflix or Pandora, forcing me to retype it with the remote control, which is annoying. Over DLNA, there are some files that it cannot fast forward/rewind through. And I do hate the automatic firmware updates, which of course happen when you turn it on and want to watch something.

It's why I keep the AppleTV with XBMC around to watch local media or listen to music. But for Netflix... I guess that's the price we have to pay.

Re:Agreed, XBMC. Your "server" can be NFS or Samba

[Grishnakh]

I tried using DLNA with the damn thing too, running every DLNA server I could find for Linux (including minidlna which a lot of people here seem to like). No luck.

I wish Netflix would release some kind of binary for XBMC and MythTV. I don't care about it being open-source, I just want something to run on those platforms so I can use those instead of a buggy proprietary player.

Re:Agreed, XBMC. Your "server" can be NFS or Samba

[Lumpy]

DLNA is not a standard. if it will not play off of a SMB share it is not worth buying. I have seen more things fail with DNLA than anything else.

Re:Agreed, XBMC. Your "server" can be NFS or Samba

[bill_mcgonigle]

I tried using DLNA with the damn thing too, running every DLNA server I could find for Linux (including minidlna which a lot of people here seem to like). No luck.

DLNA is embarrassing to firewall. Here's my config:

# DLNA
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 8200 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 2869 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 1900 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 30000:60000 -j ACCEPT

I'm using XBMC as a DLNA receiver and MediaHouse on Android as a controller. For what I need it's much more sane than trying to use a wireless keyboard remote with XBMC's onscreen menus, which are hard to use.

I'm happy for DLNA's replacement to arrive tomorrow, but I haven't found it yet.

Re:Agreed, XBMC. Your "server" can be NFS or Samba

[Grishnakh]

Um, maybe I'm missing something, but when I tried it, I was just running the DLNA servers on my Linux box, which was connected to the same network as my crappy Sony player. I'm not using any firewalling on my PC, only on the WAN side of my wireless router (DD-WRT, though now that I think about it, I was using a Linksys E4500 (stock firmware) at the time, so maybe I should try it again). I wouldn't think firewalling should be an issue for me there.

Serviio

[Andrewkov]

I haven't look at the commercial products since I wanted to set up something free. However the free solutions *will* require quite an investment in time to learn how everything works and set up your device profiles.

I'm using Serviio on my CentOS box, it took me weeks to get the profiles for all my devices working properly, but now it transcodes on the fly to my Panasonic and Samsung BueRay players (if you don't have a smart TV, get a BlueRay player that supports DLNA, should be around $100), and it works with our Android and iDevices as well.

DLNA seems to be a work in progress, it's not as seamless or as polished as I'd like it to be .. I haven't got sub-titles working (I don't have a need so I haven't spent any time on it), and the most annoying thing is that I can't fast forward or rewind playback, apparently this could be related to my version of ffmpeg, but it's something I need to look into.

Long story short, if you want to do it with free software, the technology is currently at a place where you will have to spend a lot of time getting everything working. I'm not sure how the commercial offerings compare, that might be a route to go if you don't have time to spend.

Apple TV

[Anonymous Coward]

It works, iTunes see's all my content. Only $99, and took a total of 5 minutes to setup.

Nope

[jon3k]

Nothing is 100%. Plex is pretty close. Other than that, build a PC and use Mobile Mouse.

Synology box

[Anonymous Coward]

While not rock bottom cheap, a Synology box paired with a Western Digital TV box has been a great addition to my home. The Synology NAS provides a good stable and low power DLNA media server solution and I use the WDTV (plus iPad, PC, PS3, etc...) to watch my own movies and photos taken from my digital cameras. No regrets with it yet.

Easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

XBMC.

Re:Media Server?

[Anonymous Coward]

As for Netflix, just go ahead and use a dedicated device such as a Roku or a Bluray player with apps. You won't get a good Netflix experience with XBMC (kludged for NF), or most other media player softwares. Don't waste time trying to find it. Closest thing would be a WD LIVE.

I love my WDTV Live, it recognizes Linux NFS shares and has played every damn file I've thrown at it.

yoink

[Anonymous Coward]

"We live and breathe Netflix"

That is incredibly sad.

Chines Android TV Stick

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a chinese android TV stick bought off amazon. I dont use netflix but it does work according to online reports. Amazon prime works with flash and the Android browser. I use it all the time to play movies/music off my NAS (using ES File explorer and media player). The Comcast Xfinity app works with a little hackery (using an apk that makes the stick pretend there is no HDMI) and the HBO/Showtime apps work too. It plugs into HDMI of my TV. I also use it to play international PAL DVDs that my DVD player doesnt support from a network connected laptop using wondershare player. Wondershare player can also directly play international (or other if you so desire) DVDs that I've copied onto the NAS with full menu support.

Converted to MP4

[Jason Levine]

This probably won't help the OP, but my solution was to convert my MKV files to MP4 format. The reason for this was that I was putting them on an external hard drive to connect to my Roku box. Roku says it supports MKV but in practice I've found it doesn't really. MP4, on the other hand, works nicely.

Re:Converted to MP4

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard of many media players that have poor support for mkv. My Playbook tablet won't play them either. My WD TV live has no problem with them though. I don't understand why people use mkv, MP4 is a superior format in most respects.

Re:Converted to MP4

[megalomaniacs4u]

subtitles, and multiple/alternate streams

VLC

[Anonymous Coward]

Something like this?

http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-set-vlc-player-as-media-server-to-stream-media-files-in-digital-home/

Simple: HDMI cable

[DogDude]

1. Purchase HDMI cable.
2. Plug one end into computer of some kind.
3. Plug other end into TV/stereo.

I don't understand why everybody has to use special gadgets and software and such just to watch TV and movies.

Re:Simple: HDMI cable

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us dont want to look at a PC connected to our tv?
Some want to use a proper remote control (not a keyboard).
Some want to spend the $100 on the "special gadget" instead of buying another electricity sucking computer.
Some want a turnkey solution where they buy it, turn it on do a quick setup and its working.

Re:Simple: HDMI cable

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us have tablets, phones and more than one tv that share the same content.

Mythtv & Subsonic

[ccandreva]

I use a combination of MythTV for video/DVR and Subsonic for my audio collection.

Plex and Subonsic

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep trying with Plex. From my experience with Raspberry Pis, Rokus, Boxee, XBMC and all that shit, Plex is the easiest and the best for videos. For my music collection, I prefer to use Subsonic. Which you may wont to check out.

Plex, SickBeard, CouchPotato and Roku FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

I was pretty much where you are a year ago. I had burned my entire DVD library to disk and wanted to setup a proper media server and also cut the cord to my cable company. I put together a small Core i3 based server, installed Windows (even though I'm a Linux guy...sometimes it's just easier) and installed Plex, SickBeard and CouchPotato. I've never had any problems with Plex not reading an .mkv file...although I have gotten a couple that were corrupted and had to try those again. The Plex client on my Roku has a very nice UI and makes it very easy to switch between Plex, NetFlix, Hulu and Amazon. And I can get pretty much anything I want to watch with little or not problem and very soon after broadcast. I was able to watch the entire 4th season of Downton Abbey before Christmas. I did have to wait until Christmas night to see the Christmas special.

WD TV Live + Linux Server + Samba FTW

[Trikoloko]

My setup now consists of seven WD TV Live and a Ubuntu Server with mirrorred disks with files served through Samba. The current WD TV Live works with a number of online content providers (yes, including Netflix) and plays various types of media files. Two words of advice: 1) There is a WD TV Play which is cheaper, but does not play DTS audio. For me this was a deal breaker, so I got the regular WD TV Live. 2) DLNA: Many folks love it but I hate it. I decided that I won't bother with DLNA whenever possible. It is much easier to let the client to decode the file.

iTunes and Apple TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy and bullet proof. I run iTunes on my iMac, turns on as needed, and connect two Apple TVs on a Gigabit network. Plays 1080 no problem. For conversion to mp4 I use Smart Converter Pro 2, which even tags the files properly, all automatically. Takes less than 30 seconds to convert an MKV to MP4, retrieve tags, and add to iTunes. I used to have a Synology server, before that DLNA to PS3, before that shares to an Xbox (yeah, an original Xbox) with XBMC. Trust me, AppleTV is the easiest.

HSTI's Wireless Media Stick

[ErnyCowan]

That's what I use for just that same situation. It plugs into the USB port on my Samsung TV. I point it at a shared directory on my file server. Done.

So I have spent 3 years playing with this

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's my advice:
Use ps3 media server or its fork Universal media server. Both are good, but if you have a PS3 stick with PS3 media server.

Get a Realtek media player. Start at iboum.com You won't find these devices in any US stores so online order or eBay is your only option.
You dont need a newer device. Mine is 4 years old and plays everything I've thrown at it from mp3 to mkv to .ts to .iso and .vob to.. well everything. Stay away from android based devices. I've tried several and they are slow as shit and buggy. My fav device is zinwell 5005hd. Cheap as dirt on ebay nowadays. If you get this make sure you update the firmware. Newer devices WILL INCLUDE NETFLIX, but don't expect much more than basic support.

If you want 5Ghz wireless (I did) go back onto eBay and find a Linksys WUMC710 or its earlier equivalent. In it's config menu you can set the data type to video and forget it.
My setup will stream 1080p to 3 bedrooms, and a kitchen simultaneously and wirelessly (if you have good signal)
There is only 2 tweaks worth mentioning, and that is to delete the popcornhour config file, and to edit the realtek config file to include .ts streaming (otherwise it might transcode the stream)

Re:So I have spent 3 years playing with this

[Anonymous Coward]

My fav device is zinwell 5005hd. Cheap as dirt on ebay nowadays.

Nonexistent on ebay these days. I doubt if I'd recommend it even if it was available. You're better off with a newer Realtek 1185 or 1186 based device.

Plex Problem

[ShadowSpectre]

Plex is very easy to work with; I use it to stream locally to 2 Rokus locally and to my PC remotely. If you are having problems "seeing" the files via Plex, make sure they are in the right folder specified by Plex eg movies, TV shows, etc... Second check the file names; there is specific nomenclature in regard to proper file names of the hosted titles. Third, be sure to access plex on the host device (server) and be sure to hit the 'refresh media' button for the specific section. Lastly, access the section, movies, TV shows, whatever and verify that the metadata is properly loaded and fix any mismatches. Plex is usually easy as turning on a faucet or flipping a switch.

Homemade solution

[FrogBlastTheVentCore]

I also found Plex, and other database driven, setting filled servers to be too annoying to use. I installed Apache2 and pointed it at my media folder. Then I wrote a little PHP that dumps the directory as a raw list of file paths separated by line breaks! sorted by date modified. Then I banged out a quick web page that sorts those by TV show and season. Tap a show get a list of seasons, tap a season, get a list of episodes. Each episode has a link to play it in the browser in a small frame below the episode list, a link to the actual file location,and best of all, a Javascript button that launches the episode in VLC on my TV computer using VLC's built-in HTTP interface, letting me start shows on the TV from any of my iOS devices.

Also, it's LCARS themed.

WDTV Live is the best!

[LanMan04]

Another happy WDTV Live user here. I have this exact model, purchased in November 2011:

www.amazon.com/Live-Media-Player-Wi-fi-1080p/dp/B005KOZNBW/ref=sr_1_1

Just set up a SMB or NFS share on any computer you want, and this device will play ANYTHING you can throw at it (including flv, at least in my experience). Has 100Mb ethernet, N wifi, HDMI out, optical out, USB port, and a remote.

It will talk to a "media server" if you really want it to (DLNA, etc), but I've found a simple file share is the way to go.

If you want to invest 0 time up front

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes and an AppleTV. For playing Netflix AppleTV is great. For sharing the media library an active copy of iTunes on a Mac or PC works very well. There are issues with scalability/library size but they are after you hit hundreds/thousands of movies and TV shows.

Is it the best? It's the 0 time up front solution.

Samba/NFS/XBMC

[Anonymous Coward]

My server runs both Samba and NFS (the former strictly to support my few remaining Windows boxes), and my media player runs XBMCBuntu. Samba is completely straightforward if you're saddled with Windows clients, and you can honestly use any media player you like, but they do distribute XBMC front-end libraries for Windows, if that's your bag. If it's in the cards, though, a Linux HTPC running XBMCBuntu (or anything, really) will allow you to use NFS for streaming, which is even easier to set up, and creates less of a load on your server. Each of these solutions stream virtually lossless 1080p video across an 802.11G connection that also supports other static, streaming clients (CCTV), so it's not much of a bandwidth hog.

Your issue with Plex seeing files...

[Payden K. Pringle]

Sounds like the same issue I faced.

Basically, you have to name them right or Plex won't see them. Follow the naming convention and directory layout on the Media Preparation page.

I assume this is what you mean by "more hours than I'm prepared to spend". This would be true for music, I can easily imagine. However, I personally would use Foobar2000's metadata/tag and file renaming feature to make this much easier for the music side of things. Here is a video on how to set that up. Shouldn't take more than an hour to rename them all and clean up the ones that don't work (rarely, if ever, happens).

I'm not sure on how to make the movie renaming easier, but I imagine you have far fewer of those and it wouldn't take hours to do.

Good luck.

pyTivo and/or TVersity

[HycoWhit]

Do you have DVRs on any of your TV's? I've cut the cable so to speak and only get local channels through traditional means. Everything else that gets watched s dropped on a local server and streamed on demand to the various TV's/DVRs and stereos.

pyTivo works really well if you have Tivo's attached your TVs. At $750 a pop though--Tivo's can be a really expensive set top alternative. You can find old Tivo II's on ebay with lifetime service for reasonable prices.

For TVs without Tivos--the Western Digital WD TV boxes work well. As do Xbox's and PS3's. The one DLNA server I've found that does a good job wiht the varous media formats and web streams is TVersity. I'm still running a very old, free to use version of TVersity, so I am assuming the latest versions haven't lost too much functionality. (I think some of the TVersity functionality has been shifted to the paid version versus the free edition.

It's a shame

[CCarrot]

It's too bad they're discontinued, because it looks like a Boxee Box was exactly what you were looking for...I know I loved ours, and recommended them to many other people a couple of years ago, mostly my less-than-technologically-inclined friends. We don't use it as much anymore because we moved to Plex* and a native TV client in our main viewing area instead (wanted one remote control, instead of one for everything-but-the-Boxee, then one for the Boxee), but when we needed it, Boxee was awesome...

AFAIK ours still works, but I haven't watched new content on it for so long, I don't know how well it would handle it. Suppose I should check that someday...

*Note: We haven't had any issues with Plex not reading certain files or any file formats, but we're running it from a Windoze server hiding in the basement, and viewing it on a Plex app installed on a Samsung Smart TV, so that may be why our experience was better than yours...might it be worth it to get a Win7 seat and try Plex from there instead? It won't help much with the music, unfortunately, because the Plex music interface sucks donkey arse, but for video it's pretty kickass. Subtitle and audio channel controls are available from the TV remote in the Samsung client, they're just not very intuitive...or well documented.

Streaming Now Playing music

[HycoWhit]

One of the trickiest things to get worked out was streaming music through out the house. Having a large collection, I've found MediaMonkey to be the best audio file manager and playback solution. Personally, I've gotten hooked on the AutoDJ option of MediaMonkey.

There must be a sexier way to do this--but currently when MediaMonkey is queuing and playing music with AutoDJ, I'll use NCH Broadwave Audio Streaming Server to turn the MediaMonkey machine into a live streaming box that can be accessed from the various stereos/TV around the house. The nice thing about this is when you are in the kitchen, game room, outside deck, or even sitting on the dock you will always heard the same music.

There has to be a better way to do the live streaming. I keep hoping MediaMonkey would provide the functionality, but MediaMonkey currently only streams from your collection via DLNA. i.e. No streaming of "Now Playing" over IP. Someday I'll figure it out...

xbmc, if you color inside the lines.

[nblender]

We're an XBMC house. We were a MythTV house for 7 years or so but switched to XBMC. If you color inside the lines it works terrifically. Just don't stray around the edges... There are certain files that the Acer Veriton upstairs won't play but play fine on my Mac Mini downstairs. My wife can't stream from pbs.org via the XBMC plugin on the veriton (some episodes are fine, some are all glitchy) but it works fine on the Mac Mini. Some plugins work for a while and then they stop working "foo.py addon script failed!" ... Searching for a title doesn't work very well at all... Type in "Spartacus" and it can't find it, even if you're looking right at it in the Library. etc..

Still, it's an order of magnitude better than the alternative.

MediaTomb

[ExRex]

If you're comfortable with manually editing a preferences file in XML, MediaTomb is an excellent choice.

Plex +Jriver

[Anonymous Coward]

Plex + Roku is far and away the best video media server combo I've found. I'm not sure what you may be experiencing with "finds some .mkv files, but not others", as I've got a really extensive collection, and I have yet to come up with something it wouldn't handle. I will admit, that on the music side of things, it's inadequate. For the music side of things, I use JRiver Media server, which has windows, mac, and coming soon, linux versions. I currently use Airfoil for windows to ship the audio from JRiver over to an airport express via wireless, and the airport express sends the audio across digital TOSlink into my AV receiver. Also, I can control what's playing on JRiver with their free "gizmo" app for android. Lets me browse my music from my nexus tablet and pick what plays next.

power

[schlachter]

Only that XBMC will burn 100+ watts; whereas my Synology media server uses 10 watts and is dead silent; the upgrade pays for itself over time.

Re:power

[Lumpy]

100 watts is nothing for the short times it is in use. when mine sits idle it burns 5 watts. Which is 22 hours of the day. Meaning it uses less than yours does burning it's 10 watts 24 hours a day. Just set up proper power saving functions on the motherboard and the underlying linux install and power use is a non issue.

Re:power

[Anonymous Coward]

100 watts is nothing for the short times it is in use. when mine sits idle it burns 5 watts. Which is 22 hours of the day. Meaning it uses less than yours does burning it's 10 watts 24 hours a day. Just set up proper power saving functions on the motherboard and the underlying linux install and power use is a non issue.

I don't know Synology but you are assuming it is operating at full wattage even when not in use, which seems strange if it does. Regardless, for me, having gone through multiple HTPC setups over many years, I now have one absolute requirement -- completely silent operation on the devices that are placed in the living room. That means zero moving parts, no fans (not on CPU, not on GPU, not on PSU, not in chassis), and no spinning disks. After having tried this once I was hooked. I wouldn't have complained about the noise from a "fairly silent" PC before, but after experiencing a completely silent one there is no going back.

Re:power

[jedidiah]

> Only that XBMC will burn 100+ watts; whereas my Synology media server uses 10 watts and is dead silent; the upgrade pays for itself over time.

No it won't. That's just ignorant trolling from someone with an axe to grind and blinders.

Re:power

[Jmc23]

5 x 22 = 110

100 x 2 = 200

10 x 24 =240

MythTV

[dowens81625]

I use Universal Media Server on OS X, which is available for Windows, OS X and Linux. It works well with our WD HD TV Live and various Samsung TV and DVR devices. But the first thing to do would probably be to get the Netgear device the boot.

I use Universal Media Server on OS X, which is available for Windows, OS X and Linux. It works well with our WD HD TV Live and various Samsung TV and DVR devices. But the first thing to do would probably be to get the Netgear device the boot.

I have a MythTV Frontend that sits at the TV and reads information from mounted SMB/CIFS Shares on another server for videos, and audio. I like it a lot mainly due to the IR receiver and remote setup with it for easy navigation.

Instead of looking at server software Go with Dune

[SensitiveMale]

I share my files with SMB, but I use a Dune HD B1 player. It plays everything including Blu Ray structures, DVD structures, ISO, MKV, MP4, M4V, AVI, and so on.. So if you're looking to play your files on a single TV, get the best player you can. A Dune HD.

FreeNAS server, XBMC frontend.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a very hard to beat setup because you can configure your front end the way you like. For example, if you need Netflix, then your front end can be any reasonable desktop or laptop that can run Windows XP or better. Install XBMC on your Windows machine and point it at the FreeNAS shares and optionally set the FreeNAS to do some of the decoding. You can also access the media from any mobile device (my sister's kids use their tablets and phones to watch movies from the FreeNAS at home) and the best part is that FreeNAS comes with a Transmission Bit Torrent plugin with a web interface. Use it to also obtain your (legal, licensed, non-infringing) media in the background.

We use Linux machines at our place (so no Netflix) to run XBMC or we just whip out our tablets. Our projector is hooked up to a laptop running LinuxMint XFCE and it boots into XBMC. We can easily log into the Desktop and enjoy MUCH more entertainment on the big screen such as Angry birds, Skype, Pandora etc...

If you want the Server and the Player to be all-in-one, and you really want to enjoy Netflix, then I recommend you purchase (or use one of your own) a small, powerful machine with HDMI for around $400 like this one:

Add a Blu-Ray player if you wish and believe me, your family and your guests will LOVE being able to switch between the desktop and XBMC for web surfing and other stuff. Angry Birds is actually really fun when the screen takes up your entire wall.

Final note: I gave my brother's family a small footprint, Core2 Duo with 2GB ram, 500GB drive, DVD, nVidia card (cheapest decent model with HDMI) that dual boots LinuxMint with XBMC and Windows 7 with Firefox/Netflix. It's LOADED with kids movies and they even have music and TV Shows on it (since they were able to download what they wanted from the web) and they absolutely fucking love it. I paid about $200 for everything.

Thanks for reading.

Re:FreeNAS server, XBMC frontend.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm such a dope. I forgot the link to my suggested hardware. Here ya go:

http://www.directron.com/f1a55-m-budget-pc-3.html (With HDMI)

or http://www.directron.com/budget-fm1-amd-pc-1.html (Without HDMI)

Re:DLNA

[jedidiah]

> since that's the container all the pirates seem to use for movies (I have no idea why, and I've not bothered to look into it).

It doesn't have any arbitrary limits imposed upon it unlike "legitimate" video containers.

Got a DVD? Just want a "compressed" version of that? MKV will handle it. The "anointed" file format will not.

MKV isn't about "piracy". It's about doing creative things that get you accused of piracy by the iCult crowd.

Boxee box

[Anonymous Coward]

Just buy one

Solution: Android mini pc + XBMC

[wasteoid]

Since the TV does not have media browsing/playback capabilities built-in, he needs a front-end device to provide the media to the TV, such as the Netgear NeoTV Max. He's currently using his PC running Linux Mint as his media server.

The problem is the Netgear NeoTV Max is not seeing all the media while using: Plex, Serviio. He would also like it to stream BBC.

For a back-end media server, there are two main options: transcoding or non-transcoding. Plex transcodes (translates video from one format to another) on-the-fly, so it should be mostly seamless and allow playback of a wider variety of formats. XBMC does not transcode (there may be a plugin for that now), but it is easy to setup and free and highly configurable, although you don't have to change anything if you just want to use it as a media server. The capability to transcode a media file is not essential, unless your front end device has limited media playback capabiliites.

For a front end device, either a small media player, like the NeoTV, Roku or WD TV Live, or an Android mini pc should work fine. Some of the new Android gaming devices, like the Oyua, Madcatz MOJO and Huawei Tron come with the ability to run Android programs, which enables running the Android version of XBMC. Using XBMC as a front-end client interface allows streaming media, such as BBC, to the TV.

I recommend getting an Android mini pc, such as the Huawei Tron or Madcatz MOJO, and run XBMC on it. I would also recommend running XBMC on the Linux Mint media server. The Android mini pc attached to the TV will be able to view and play the media files on the Linux Mint media server that is also running XBMC.

Re:DLNA

[nabsltd]

I've only thrown .mkv files at Plex, since that's the container all the pirates seem to use for movies (I have no idea why, and I've not bothered to look into it).

It's because MKV isn't proprietary, is in active development, and was designed from the ground up to be able to contain completely arbitrary data, so even an "unsupported" format can be stored inside it as just a binary blob.

Add in the fact that it has direct support for nearly every codec in use today, plus the tools that can understand those formats enough to extract every bit of metadata along with the content, and you have the only reasonable container for movies.

Plex or XBMC

[Anonymous Coward]

XBMC is great. So far not a single issue. Plex is also great so far not a single issue with any MKV file. Now Plex crashes if I try streaming mp3's. It might just be the size of my music folder.

Plex... pretty brain dead simple

[HockeyPuck]

To me I wanted a solution that "just worked" for everyone in the family. That included me not wanting to have to compile anything or modify scripts, and the interface had to look polished hence running VLC isn't a solution for me.

I've got a 2010 mac mini with an external nas hooked up to my TV. I've got over a hundred movies ripped and thousands of mp3s and a few dozen tv shows. I put them into to root folders "Movies", "music" and "TV Shows". I pick the right scanner for each (30 seconds worth of effort). If I wanted I could store the music in iTunes and plex can retrieve it from there.

As long as you've got the files named something useful (I use the movie's name and year of release in the filename rather than "ROTJ.mov"). Only issues are with titles that are a bit out there like concert DVDs, and for those very few I just manually correct it. (5 min of work).

The GUI for plex is optimized for a remote control If you've got the silver apple remote this is perfect (the old white plastic one didn't have enough buttons). Or just use the iphone/android app instead. I do have an IR keyboard if I need to do something on the mac.

External subtitles in PLEX

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they work fine if the subtitles (.srt) file is names the same as the .m4v/.mkv file. PLEx is an excellent solution paired with a handful of ROKU's around the house running the PLEX channel.

Plex on ClearOS

[Anonymous Coward]

ClearOS just added Plex to the marketplace. This makes setting up Plex very turnkey on standard equipment. Setup ClearOS. Install Plex. Done. Plus with all the other things like Samba integration makes it a dream for setting it up so that non-technical people can use it.

mediaportal

[Anonymous Coward]

DIdn't see it mentioned or was it?
All I see are the xbmc fanbois and I know there is more than just that available.
Honestly everything mentioned is a pita to set up, tweak and expect users to learn.

DLNA and uPNP are bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I know these protocols mean well, but I have never seen an off-the-shelf box, or a "smart TV" that is anywhere near half as capable, user-friendly, across-the-board compatible-with-everything-anyone-ever-thought-of, or convenient, as a dirt cheap computer using NFS mounts and mplayer. If you really don't want a computer that is _labeled_ as a "computer" then I've found Western Digital's little media box to be best. WD's stuff makes Rokus and Apple TVs and Samsung smart TVs all still look half a decade or so behind the times.

Dear Slashdot Help Me Pirate Content

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Slashdot,

As you may know piracy of video content is hard. Newbs like me need help getting that stuff on our big flatscreen tvs. Paying the artists for content is beneath us because our class of people is above that. Please help me because I am technical, yet not technical enough to figure it out.

Regards,
New Bee

No Netflix, but Mede8er is good.

[Petersko]

I'm using a Mede8er MED600X3D. I love it. It's XBMC based with a large community of modders. I stream uncompressed blu ray mkvs with lossless audio from my NAS without any problems at all. Supports HDMI 1.4a, 3D, and pretty much everything I throw at it. The only glitch I've had is that it's not licensed for DiVX on AVI, so I had to change the FourCC to XVid, and that solved it. AVI is dead to me anyway.

It doesn't fulfill the netflix requirement, but after many years of playing "find the magic codec" with my WD devices this one was simply an awesome breath of fresh air.

Mainstream Solution for Those Sick of Tinkering

[Slider451]

Mainstream solution using existing hardware without a lot of tinkering:

Server hardware: 5-year old multi-purpose Windows 7 PC (gaming, work) with a networked Silicondust HDHomeRun Prime tuner and Comcast Cablecard.
Server software: Windows Media Center, Plex server, MCEBuddy (to transcode and compress .WTV to .mp4 for mobile copies), iTunes
Clients: Roku with Plex, Xbox 360 (media center extender), Apple TV, mobile iOS devices w/ Plex

I can play games while WMC records two shows simultaneously in the background.
Plex on the Roku will transcode HD .WTV recordings on the fly.
Media Center extender on the XBox 360 works flawlessly. I wish they didn't yank the functionality from the XBone. I won't buy one until they add it back as an app.
Mobile devices can steam Plex locally, or must wait for MCEBuddy to finish transcoding to sync an mp4 for travel. This can take as long as the original recording playtime.
Apple TV will show the same mp4s I make for my mobile devices but I rarely use it for that.

Serviio rocks

[petermp]

My Current setup is: HP Miniserver 1 x 250 GB 3 x 3 TB FreeBSD(Nas4Free) Serviio 2 x LG and 1 x Samsung TV It works really great. My suggestion is: Stick with serviio, just make a post on serviio forum - maybe you need to change Serviio profile to "encode everything"(if you can afford it CPU wise), but really so far I never had any problem with any .mkv file ...

Media Server or Media Player?

[cslewis2007]

The original poster was asking for advice concerning media servers, yet most of the comments here have been about players. Personally, I think the need for a media server has largely gone away. Most NAS devices support either DLNA, NFS, SMB, etc., and any media player worth its salt can find sources on the local network and play them. Yes, if you want to be able to transcode on the fly, then Plex makes sense, but how much transcoding is really required these days. My current set up includes: Dlink DNS-325 running firefly that my Roku soundbridges / iTunes clients use for music. Yes, it's old school, but I love the soundbridges. In terms of media players, I use the D-Link boxee box. It's not super fast, but it can use nfs to stream movies from the DNS-325. I would like to run XBMC on it instead, but I'd lose Netflix if I did that.

Serviio worked fine for me

[ahodgson]

I installed Serviio on an existing Gentoo box, added a couple of packages (ffmpeg, etc), and it has worked fine with my Sony BlueRay player for a couple of years now with no problems. I don't really do playlists or anything, just navigating folders and watching a couple movies or shows at a time.

PlayOn Anybody?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't seen anybody suggest PlayOn (http://www.playon.tv/playon). It's not free but it's fairly inexpensive for a lifetime license. You get lots of TV channels, you can use your Netflix, it can transcode just about anything you have on the fly if your device doesn't understand the particular format (you can also tell it to NOT transcode the format because your device DOES understand it), and it works with a ton of devices (Roku, Xbox, Wii, PS3, DLNA enabled device, etc...). It also has a community that has created plugins for a bunch of other channels.

Is it easy to use? Yup. It's actually super easy to use. Support? I've found the forums to be pretty good. E-mailing support gets you a fast answer but it doesn't mean it gets you a great answer. The support guys aren't exactly stellar.

HDMI to remote network server

[Anonymous Coward]

IN my scenario I don't want to keep a server by the TV, but stored away in another room. I have a wired network and simply want to have XBCM in that room. Feasable, or too impractical?

Get rid of the Netgear NeoTV box

[monkeyhybrid]

Your problem with some file formats not playing will more than likely be down to the Netgear box not supporting the wide array of file formats and codec variations you'll find in use on the net. All proprietary players suck because of this. For something cheap and very full featured, try Raspbmc on a Raspberry Pi (with the optional codecs and a remote control). Raspbmc will play absolutely anything you throw at it.

On the server side it's much easier. Either stick with Plex (it will probably be fine streaming to a decent player like Raspbmc / XBMC) or you could try something like MediaTomb or PS3 Media Server, both of which offer transcoding too (for shitty players).

Heaven

[John Allsup]

"And if any or all of these things can also let me play streaming video off the web (like BBC iPlayer content), I'll be in heaven.)"

Yes.  If you see all of that in one product, it means either you're dreaming or your dead.

Re:Heaven

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

The thing you have to understand is that this isn't a technical problem.

All of these things are well understood, and there are Free Software libraries that will do all of these things (indeed the proprietary commercial solutions are often built with these very self-same libraries).

No, this is a *legal* problem, with patents on software destroying the opportunity to create many wonderful things that consumers would love to buy, if the legal framework allowed it, which it doesn't.

It's almost unimaginable how much damage one simple thing (allowing patents on software) has done to the industry.

Rygel is Simple and Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally use Rygel. I have it installed on a Fedora virtual machine. It pushes out all of my content to my DLNA enabled devices. The only issue I have had comes from 64bit encoded video files. But that is a long story.

Popcorn hour

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm quite happy with my popcorn hour A400. They had teething problems, but with the latest software updates everything is use works nicely. It's a standalone box with an infrared remote that I threw a 3 TB drive into. It can also mount other media via nfs or samba.

It plays almost everything I've thrown at it. It's nice that I can completely power it down when it's not being used. Or I can leave it in standby mode and let the torrent client run.

By default it has an image-based library browser that shows info about the movies / shows that it downloads from imdb and elsewhere. This works better if the files follow the convention that it expects. Of course you can use a simple file browser if you prefer.

It also handles audio nicely, including flac.

It's somewhat hackable, and some folks have built apache, python, and other packages that can be installed on it.

live transcoding is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

get a better front end, live transcoding can only degrade quality

Synology + matricom android box

[Anonymous Coward]

Synology nas as the server, matricom midnight as the client (an android box that you connect to your tv). I highly recommend an air mouse as well. This way you get access to all Android apps. Think youtube, netflix, hbo go, songza, tunes in, games, ... all on your tv. Best combo by far I have found.

rpi replaces hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

no, the rpi can *replace* his hardware...

my pi only draw 2 watts vs my ps3 which draws 50+ watts. you do the math...

Run xbmc (using OpenELEC or raspbmc) and voila -- cheap, low-energy home media server.

Re:rpi replaces hardware

[camperdave]

... and how many PS3 games can your raspberry pi play?

Here's how I'd do it

[atari2600a]

Create a networked folder & within it symlink all your stuff. I don't care what networking protocol you use, but the linuxier, the better. On your TV's end, install Ubuntu or whatever, raise the font dpi, maybe bold high contrast inverted to make it resemble a 10-foot interface. Then, have the media folder on your desktop & teach your family how to right-click > open in VLC or to open VLC, File > Open Directory, or whatever. I know it sounds sloppier than a Del Taco bathroom, but to me it's the simplest solution available. Easiest setup, no dicking around with last year's 10-foot bullshit that gets closed-sourced half-way through or some shit, just vanilla Ubuntu or whatever & a file server.

Re:USB mass storage network file share

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

This looks like what you wanted:

http://hsti.com/products/wirelessmediastick

disclaimer, I haven't tried this at all...

Jeremy.

Boxee

[Vrtigo1]

Honestly, Boxee Box is probably one of the best STBs. It'll play just about anything and has an app for Netflix.

I had one and got rid of it because it was a bit flaky, but in terms of your requirements it's the only thing I've found that does everything you're looking for.

simplest server solution

[h4rryc4ry]

I use the original Boxee Box (not Boxee TV). I've had it since they came out some 5 or 6 years ago. It connects to your network (wired or wireless). It has streamed everything I've thrown at it, including hi-definition content. Although I do only use it on a wired connection, your experience with wi-fi may differ. Did I mention it has played every file I've thrown at it? (I've got 900+ movies and 10,000+ audio files in various formats on my PC) The box itself has an HDMI connector for your TV (along with analog connectors) and a USB port for a flash drive or portable HD. You can surf the internet with the built in browser or choose an app for various services and streaming sites (e.g. Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, MLB.com, et al). The remote is RF and has a full qwerty keyboard. Sadly, D-Link no longer makes them but they can still be found for sale under $200.00. (NOS) I've got a new "smart" TV that includes a built-in media server but doesn't compare to my box.

Mac Mini, there, I said it.

[dnaumov]

You can probably achieve similar results with a cheap Intel NUC, but I happened to have a Mini and I am VERY happy with the results. I use Rowmote as the remote control/touchpad/keyboard to control it, Air Video to stream my video library to my iPhone over the internet when not at home, XBMC and VLC locally as well as all the other usual suspects.

Yes it's relatively expensive, yes it's overkill. But it does the job really really well, shit just works and it's tiny and beautiful.

What I use

[sootman]

Not for everyone, YMMV, etc. You can get an old Intel Mac Mini for around $150. If you're lucky, it'll come with the original little white remote. If not, you can buy the current silver one and it'll work. You want 10.6 (Snow Leopard) because it's the last version of OS X that came with Front Row. (More than that, Front Row won't run AT ALL (grr...) on 10.7 or newer. You can also run 10.4 or 10.5 if that's what it came with and you can't get your hands on a 10.6 disc.)

Intel Minis have a) an IR sensor for the remote, b) integrated graphics (meh) with H264 decoding in hardware (yay), c) and optical digital audio out. (It might not play perfect 1080 if it's old, but all should do 720p fine, and newer ones will handle 1080.) G4 minis have no remote sensor and their 32 MB dedicated video will play back MP4-encoded files OK but it'll gag a bit on H264, even at 720x400. Obviously, avoid the original Core Solo minis (they're rare) and go for a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo. But buy one old enough that it'll run 10.6.

Load your stuff into iTunes, set the properties on the files so they sort into TV/Movies/etc, and it's easy to use. I have one: 1.66 GHz Core Duo; 2 GB RAM; piped to a TV at 720p via DVI->HDMI; uses overscan but I can live with it. My wife can use it, and my son has been able to use it since he was about 5 or 6. I put a 500 GB hard drive into one and it has hundreds of hours of captured video and ripped DVDs. You can also drag entire DVD rips (i.e., with VIDEO_TS folders) into ~/Movies/ and it'll find those too, in case you have any DVDs that you want to use with menus. (As opposed to ripping to an MP4 file.)

It's not perfect -- what is? -- but it's easy to use, stable, and flexible. When not using Front Row, I can use a laptop to VNC in and run shows from network websites, Hulu, etc. And it also serves as a DVD player. Just pop a disc in and it'll appear in Front Row. It uses very little power, is basically silent, and for extra power savings I have it set to sleep every night at 1am. Pressing 'menu' on the remote wakes it. (And you can press and hold 'play' to put it to sleep.) Uptime is measured in months. I'm very sad that Apple quit making Front Row an app (the Apple TV is just way too limited for me) and I'll stockpile these things if I have to and use them for years.

Re:Media Server?

[KingMotley]

XBMC is an awesome Media Player if... you only have 1 user, and you only have one place you watch stuff, and that place is always connected through a local LAN, and everywhere you store media is available 24x7. Violate any of those, and things quickly go down hill -- all of which PLEX does quite easily.

Obligatory Onion!

[ulatekh]

Whatever you do, don't use Sony's stupid "web" thing as your media server.

I had to do low-level programming of Sony video-game console hardware for several years. I found this video positively cathartic.

NAS?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're asking how to set up a NAS?

You can use a dedicated NAS, or an old PC You have laying around, or upgrade an old system (possibly to hold more and larger hard disks.)

A few suggestions:
(1) Make the system double as a HTPC. This system runs torrents, recodes videos, rips media, etc. This will be a decent video editing system.
(2) Automatically back it up to another HTPC. This one does not download, recode, or rip. It might seed some torrents long-term. The hardware needs are lessened here. Basically, it's a bunch of HDDs in a PC with an HDMI out.
(3) Have everything else just stream files from one of those two systems.

For a good case, check out NewEgg's Rosewill RSV-L4500 and RSV-L4411, priced between $100 and $200. These are 15-bay rackmount cases that take standard motherboards (because cluefull people know almost all home theater equipment fits either 19" racks or 14" racks, and have everything rackmounted or sitting on a shelf in a rack.)

The real problem is security. I'll leave that to You, as it's half network and half keeping the NAS patched over many years. (You're not dumb enough to not use a secure password, or to leave unnecessary ports open.)

Tried Plex and failed

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Based on this:

If you just want it to put up all of your media as-is without matching against a DB you need to select the "Home Videos" scanner type, which simply walks the filesystem and builds a matching hierarchy in the Plex library.

I installed Plex, pointed it at the directories with video of any type in them (as a "Home Videos" group) and set it loose. It found nothing. There are thousands of videos on the subject drive in various subdirectories and it found exactly zero.

On the chance that it doesn't build the library via a recursive search and thus requires each individual directory to be entered, I went back and did that with a Music group pointing at a directory full of MP3s and FLAC files. I also added another directory to my Home Videos group, said directory being filled with hundreds of videos of all sorts of types. It found zero files.

No idea what I'm doing wrong and there don't seem to be enough controls for me to play with settings until I fix things. I'm looking for something else.

The solution that few here will admit works

[radarskiy]

iTunes + AppleTV

Yes, the source is as closed as your father's anus isn't but it has the twin advantages of a) working, with b) relatively little effort. The most I have to do is when I rip a new disc I have to click a few buttons in MakeMKV, a while after that click a few buttons in Handbrake, and a while after that drag to "Automatically Add to iTunes". I can send to multiple receivers, I can control playback from the computer, from the AppleTV remote, or from the Remote app on any of my IOS devices. And I didn't have to expend time worth more than the hardware.

(And still not one DRM-encumbered file in the library. If Apple we wiped from history tomorrow, I could still pick up my files and move on.)

Re:Media Server?

[Grishnakh]

As for Netflix, just go ahead and use a dedicated device such as a Roku or a Bluray player with apps. You won't get a good Netflix experience with XBMC (kludged for NF), or most other media player softwares. Don't waste time trying to find it.

I have one of those Blu-Ray players with apps for watching Netflix. I don't get a good Netflix experience there either.

Twonky

[izm]

I've used Twonky Media Server for a while as a UPnP server, and been reasonably pleased. Plex is great for all the metadata it gives you along with the other features (particularly the ability to stream iPlayer content with the plugin that's available), but is really really finicky about file naming conventions and directory structures. Twonky seems to just list and transcode without much fuss.

Re:XBMC ftl

[Kirth]

I tried it with my collection. It mostly can't cope with my mkv files; it might play them, but it can't read the metadata or the covers (which actually ALL my files have, just as all of them are mkv).

http://seegras.discordia.ch/Blog/matroshka-and-the-state-of-movie-metadata/

Re:USB mass storage network file share

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes indeed !!
It seems to have been withdrawn from sale. There is another company (misplaced the link) doing this now too, but its' also no longer available from Amazon nor elsewhere.

Actually whilst lamenting, I thought about these EyeFi cards. Which nice individuals have hacked.
The inbuilt linux embedded system can communicate with teh SD card. So now I'm thinking of a special folder on my media server which has symbolic links to the actual files and I do a calculation to ensure that it's below the actual size of the uSD card fitted to the EyeFi.

Then using rsync to follow the symbolic links every X period, and update the physical files onto the remote uSD card which is plugged into the TV.

Because:

The rsync man page describes this option:

-L, --copy-links
        When symlinks are encountered, the item that they point to (the
        referent) is copied, rather than the symlink. In older versions
        of rsync, this option also had the side-effect of telling the
        receiving side to follow symlinks, such as symlinks to directo-
        ries. In a modern rsync such as this one, you'll need to spec-
        ify --keep-dirlinks (-K) to get this extra behavior. The only
        exception is when sending files to an rsync that is too old to
        understand -K -- in that case, the -L option will still have the
        side-effect of -K on that older receiving rsync.

EyeFi cards are only about $30.

So then I just mod my media browser for an option to send to device X and invoke Rsync on demand or schedule.

New project for me :o)

Use PlayOn through a Roku

[Anonymous Coward]

PlayOn.tv the PlayOn software installs easily, works with Roku, and is very capable and stable. Also it has a lot of capability to capture web PC only tv and route to the Roku. Have used for years and it is worthy of consideration.

ZaReason's Breeze Server 5880 or MediaBox 5440, or

[cboslin]

If you have the money to spend and do not want to build your own Linux media server (plan to do this with my older ZaReason Breeze 4220 PC), you could checkout ZaReason's product offerings. They build Linux boxes, you tell them what Linux distro you want on them.

ZaReason's small footprint media server, MediaBox 5440 (quad core power in a little bitty living space) or if you have room for a bigger box and are interested in 4 hot swappable sata bays, the Breeze Server 5880 looks like a very nice server.

Of course any Linux server can be made into a media server and any Linux PC can be turned into your personal DVR and a Linux server. Once you start using a Linux box this way, you will not want to 'stream' content over the internet, especially if you are a cable internet subscriber. Especially with a new LG 60 inch LED TV 1080p 300hz (Monitor wall anyone?) costing under $800! Just plug into your Linux PC and enjoy watching what you download!

Remember that 100% of Cable Internet providers throttle their bandwidth, meaning DSL is usually faster than their throttled cable bandwidth promises. DSL is usually cheaper too! The cable company's marketing bandwidth claims are lies based on this throttling!

(Run DD-WRT on a supported device to see your actual bandwidth in real time after the speed test ends, cable users will be shocked and disgusted!

A promise of 20MB/4MB gets throttled to less than 101Kb/20Kb in my experience and I guestimate you need at least 230Kb upstream for the stuttering to stop and they throttle the upstream to less than 20Kbs if you have the means to see it, granted other factors apply) This is why most of us download something before we watch it, forget about streaming over the Internet!

And with the recent net neutrality loss in the DC courts (January 14, 2014), this is going to become more of a problem for those of us wishing to download and stream content. It's going to get ugly folks!

I highly recommend Firefox with the DownloadHelper Plugin in order to download content from the Internet. Don't worry about the proprietary Windows formatted content, there are always other options, usually on the same download site. My friends and I refuse to purchase music that can not be played on any of our Linux devices (mp3, handheld, tablet, laptop, PC, server). If everyone did this, proprietary formats would be useless. And I pay for some content, just not proprietary formatted content. Even in the days of VCRs, I did not want to own every movie that I watched, only the few that I really loved, thus using a PC like a VCR, as in DVR, simply is the way we have always been doing things. If a TV/Cable Series or Movie is that good, I go buy it, usually after multiple seasons our out. Got all 10 Seasons of Stargate for under $300 at Fry's Electronics in CA, think I paid under $199, but its been awhile. Bought DVR version of "Dave" too, wish all our presidents were like Dave! Love that movie.

You can pretty much download anything down to a Linux PC and then stream it from there 'locally' on your network. This basically uses your harddrive like your own personal DVR box, no bandwidth throttling by cable companies to cause your streaming to stutter or stop. And you simply erase it after you watch it, just like we did with VCR tape recorders back in the day.

Full Disclosure, I do not work for ZaReason, just met the owners at SCaLE in Los Angeles a few years back (SCaLE 7x in 2008 I believe) and was very impressed with them, their company and their products. Became a customer i

TranquilPC Riley Media Server

[Anonymous Coward]

This high-end, ultra-quiet, quality engineered server is available from small UK business, TranquilPC.
their customer support is sketchy but it's a quality machine running Windows Home Server. Fully DNLA compatible, also runs my Squuezebox media server and supports the Apple fan boys with their lower quality streaming needs :-)

i'm having trouble understanding

[Anonymous Coward]

why you have made your life so complicated. a proxy on chrome will get you bbc and there are multiple sites for streaming movies. and some of these have movies besides the usual hollywood crap.

Not the server, but the client

[AdamWill]

Are you sure your problem is the server and not the client? You keep saying the server 'doesn't show' your video files, but are you sure the problem isn't that your client box is not capable of playing them? Many of those boxes have fairly limited format compatibility.

I've been through various HTPC setups over the years, and the one I'm happy with is a PC - I use a Zotac Zbox, but you can buy a lot of similar HTPC-type boxes that will be fine for the job - running OpenELEC, a special-purpose Linux distro which is basically a very light framework for running XBMC. I don't use a 'media server' at all, I just have a NAS which shares the files via CIFS (always seems to work better for this purpose than NFS, for some reason). I've tried various streaming boxes, including a Popcorn Hour when that was the flavour of the month and supposed to play any format imaginable and work with subtitles and so on, and they all had some kind of problem which made them a PITA. It may be old-skool and 'unelegant', but a PC running XBMC is still the most versatile 'media player' box I've found.

Mediatomb

[Anonymous Coward]

I use mediatomb running on Debian for my streaming needs. Although I had to add a script to transcode some formats, it now plays everything I throw at it.

False premise.

[RockDoctor]

We live and breathe Netflix

Nope. You (second person, plural) may live and breathe Netflix, and possibly even watch a lot of TV and movies (if that is what Netflix does ; never seen it myself), but you and your associates are not everyone.