Wireless/streaming video entertainment setup

profitmotive said:
ONE BOX.

ONE SOLUTION.

THE ONLY WAY.

Get a WDTV Live Hub WDTV Live Hub. Seriously...

Stop messing around with a whole bunch of messy servers and clients and other nonsense. The WDTV live hub is made by Western Digital and has a 1 Terabyte drive built in.

It also has all the top apps like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Plex, etc. It's like a roku that is actually useful for something other than just streaming from the internet.

The reason I love it the most though is the built in media player can play damn near ANY file type you throw at it. .MKV .AVI. MP4 .MOV raw dvd rip files anything.

Why try to stream a multi-GB file over your network to a player when you can have it play right off the local device's hard drive? Kind of a no brainer tbh.
Click to expand...

What if you have like 5 TV's in your house? One box for each TV? Then maintain the movies on each one? Sounds like a boat load of work.

A centralized server such as a NAS or DLNA allows you to view those movies on almost any device in your house over WiFi or LAN.
 


Didn't read most of bread but here's my 2 cents.

Unless you go with a dedicated HTPC and use DLNA streaming, the biggest issue I found is a laggy interface. It's one of the reasons why I don't like using the Smart TV to stream.

Ps3 + ps3mediaserver (or xbox360 and its equivalent) will accomplish most of what you want.
 
modded wdlive box for streaming content.
XBMC for playing content on HD.

1 HD for all the content which I can access from all my tv's that have the WD box on it.
 
I've got a Samsung smart tv [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-PN64D7000-64-Inch-1080p-Plasma/dp/B004MN57Q8"]Amazon.com: Samsung PN64D7000 64-Inch 1080p 600 Hz 3D Plasma HDTV (Black) [2011 MODEL]: Electronics[/ame], Optoma hd8200 projector, logitech/google tv, Apple TV, Denon 3312ci receiver with dual hdmi ouputs for the tv and the projector
I keep trying different things to see which works best. They all have their pro's and con's. I like apple tv a lot, but need to have itunes share on my computer for movies. GoogleTV has a decent media player that lets me play pretty much all of my movies on my NAS (which I can access from multiple tv's and computers), and it allows me to browse the web with chrome and has tons of android apps, so that has it's pro's. I really don't use the Smart TV to acccess apps and stuff so much, the interface isn't quite as smooth as the other two options. However, the picture quality on the Samsung plasma is outstanding (as well as the hd projector)
I've yet to find a good all purpose solution though that gives me everything that I want. The Denon receiver that I just picked up does do a good job of bringing them all together for me though (and upconverts everything to 1080p, since the Apple TV I have is only 720).
I use a Harmony One remote that allows me to manage most components with just one remote (and lets the wife and kids be able to use everything), but I still need to tweak it a bit more to get it just right.
 
This is the best device IMO: Boxee

It will play all movie types, including MKV, streams unlimited, give you access to Netflix and all the other major apps.

A+ highly recommend.
 
Boxee sucks ass. It used to be good but they've basically stopped improving and developing the software.

If you torrent, and get a smart TV just make sure it will play the files you're interested in. I got a smart LG which is great in everything but it doesn't play .mkv files. So i got a boxee that will play .mkv but turns out Boxee can be an irritating bitch for other reasons.
 
Netphase said:
I read that local network streaming was removed on the "Boxee TV".

You could do it on the older "Boxee Box".
Click to expand...

ohh,

have the old one, so maybe you're right. They're idiots if they removed streaming that was what made it good.

WickedJoe said:
Boxee sucks ass. It used to be good but they've basically stopped improving and developing the software.

If you torrent, and get a smart TV just make sure it will play the files you're interested in. I got a smart LG which is great in everything but it doesn't play .mkv files. So i got a boxee that will play .mkv but turns out Boxee can be an irritating bitch for other reasons.
Click to expand...


You do have restart from time to time, but I've had pretty good luck with it otherwise.



http://connect360.en.softonic.com/mac works with mac + xbox which is the other setup I've used, but no MKV support.
 
Boxee is really just a branch of XBMC that started a while back. Got some traction and some big names behind them then they started dying with the new products hitting the market and never really made it back on the radar.

DLNA is the easiest setup. Since you can get a router with DLNA and attach a hard drive, then your ready to go with any DLNA capable device on your network (this is really nice as it's kinda like plug n play).

DLNA does have drawbacks such as certain formats not playing, won't render sub titles on screen and yes you need to depend on each interfaces functionality to access the library. There are DLNA servers such as Tonkey that will render video on the fly so that it will convert the media to the correct encoding and even render the subtitles over the image, ofcourse that's extra processing that isn't really necessary IMHO.

The best alternative that I've found is ATV2 + XBMC. It plays every file and srt files. However those ATV2 boxes are hard to find and the interface isn't perfect, as it crashes sometimes and it's only 720p.

The only thing I don't like about XBMC is that it doesn't make it very easy to have centralized movie information. When it downloads information it downloads it all from the net on each device. So this is kinda heavy and does not work on the ATV2, would prefer to see XBMC use a central server for that. It won't be long I don't think for that feature though since they have received this request a ridiculous # of times and their new version which includes a PVR is going through BETA / RC releases now.
 
WickedJoe said:
Boxee sucks ass. It used to be good but they've basically stopped improving and developing the software.

If you torrent, and get a smart TV just make sure it will play the files you're interested in. I got a smart LG which is great in everything but it doesn't play .mkv files. So i got a boxee that will play .mkv but turns out Boxee can be an irritating bitch for other reasons.
Click to expand...

That's why you a server that will transcode them on the fly
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom