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Started by DigiCorn, February 22, 2012, 09:15:39 AM

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DigiCorn

#45
Read that. Roku looks like the way to go... with PlayOn (Not the Roku 2, oddly, but a lower version).

Bought a NAS for personal use ($135 for 2TB, but I added another 2TB for $130 more). Used handbrake to prep files and streaming on Roku with the Roksbox. Very nice!

If you decide you're looking for a cheap NAS for personal use (not sure how well this would hold up in a work environment) check this out: http://www.amazon.com/Buffalo-Technology-CloudStor-CS-WX2-0-1D/dp/B004RFGK2Q/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1330361981&sr=1-2

If you add a second drive, it's a 2TB max addition for a total of 4TB. You can use the Buffalo software to make your own 4TB RAID or have them display as 2 separate drives. I made mine 2 separate drives: 2TB for just music and the other 2TB for just movies. This is the drive I added: http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Desktop-WD20EARX/dp/B004VFJ9MK/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1330362009&sr=1-2
"There's been a lot of research recently on how hard it is to dislodge an impression once it's been implanted in someone's mind. (This is why political attack ads don't have to be true to be effective. The other side can point out their inaccuracies, but the voter's mind privileges the memory of the original accusation, which was juicier than any counterargument ever could be.)"
― Johnny Carson

"Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it."
– Nikki Sixx

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
― Ernest Hemingway

t-pat

major show stopper with Plex for us is that it doesn't play out of .rars. The media server is good enough for the Roku to play some local media and web streaming stuff.

Installed and set up xbmc on my newly fixed htpc (which now runs a lot quieter thanks to a new psu and a vigorous blowing out with compressed air, and I've made it so the cats can't sleep on it anymore).

My setup will be Roku upstairs in the bedroom where it is now, htpc in the living room where it is now, running uTorrent and xbmc, a (newly purchased and on it's way) 19" led tv in the kitchen on an articulating wall mount arm, with probably a hdmi to cat 6 converter setup coming off the htpc and cable box, run down through the baseboard into the basement then back up into the kitchen feeding the kitchen tv off the living room gear so both can have the same thing on it.

I alternately have an idea of buying a small form factor pc, with xbmc  and a cable box to the kitchen tv. There's a plugin for xbmc that supposedly will synchronize 2 xbmcs to play the same thing. I'll probably do this eventually as the wife likes to have a computer in the kitchen. I may just opt for using the android tablet with a hdmi cable instead, it'll play most stuff and be good for surfing the web, with a wireless keyboard/touchpad combo.

oh and there's a basement tv with a cable box and a wii, I think plex works for wii? not sure on this but it doesn't matter, never gets used.
vdp donkey
gmc inspire • sarcasm while you wait

DigiCorn

PlayOn works for the Wii... and I spoke to a guy at Naxi-X who says development is all but over for Plex and PlayOn, which means forget about using Navi-X on anything other than a media PC. It "works" on Boxee, but he says to use XBMC if you want it to work best. Here's a cool site with stealth media PCs: http://xbmc.org/natethomas/2011/11/26/feature-friday-hidden-htpcs/
"There's been a lot of research recently on how hard it is to dislodge an impression once it's been implanted in someone's mind. (This is why political attack ads don't have to be true to be effective. The other side can point out their inaccuracies, but the voter's mind privileges the memory of the original accusation, which was juicier than any counterargument ever could be.)"
― Johnny Carson

"Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it."
– Nikki Sixx

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
― Ernest Hemingway

Joe

Tried watching a college basketball game on Saturday on ESPN3. First I tried Plex but everything I tried to play just displayed the word "Error" on the screen. After looking at the Plex forum I found that ESPN3 has a list of ISP's that are only allowed to get ESPN3 and unfortunately my local ISP is not on the list so I thought I was dead in the water but just for kicks I tried ESPN3 on XBMC. It allowed me to watch it though there was a great deal of buffering and it often kicked me back out to the listing page. Was a real pain to try to watch. Can't find anyway to watch ESPN3 on the Roku either.

Digi, you mentioned you were using Roksbox. Wondering why you are using the pay option instead of the free USB Media channel?
Mac OS Sonoma 14.2.1 (c) | (retired)

The seven ages of man: spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills and wills.

Farabomb

Only issue I have been having is my suck ass internet is too damn slow. Some channels are better than others but some are unwatchable.

Some of the free channels are ad supported and while I don't mind and understand you have to pay the bills but every 10 minutes? Also don't just return back to the same spot, go back 10 seconds. Jumping in really screws with the flow.


Probably should start a new thread with the best channels free/paid.
Speed doesn't kill, rapidly becoming stationary is the problem

I'd rather have stories told than be telling stories of what I could have done.

Quote from: Ear on April 06, 2016, 11:54:16 AM
Quote from: Farabomb on April 06, 2016, 11:39:41 AMIt's more like grip, grip, grip, noise, then spin and 2 feet in and feel shame.
I once knew a plus-sized girl and this pretty much describes teh secks. :rotf:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
         —Benjamin Franklin

My other job

t-pat

Quote from: DigiCorn on February 27, 2012, 02:09:02 PMPlayOn works for the Wii... and I spoke to a guy at Naxi-X who says development is all but over for Plex and PlayOn, which means forget about using Navi-X on anything other than a media PC. It "works" on Boxee, but he says to use XBMC if you want it to work best. Here's a cool site with stealth media PCs: http://xbmc.org/natethomas/2011/11/26/feature-friday-hidden-htpcs/

I haven't turned on the wii in months so doesn't matter. I think I used tversity with it and it "worked" but was so poky that it wasn't pleasurable to deal with.

Navi-x "worked" on boxee, but not as well as xbmc.

Looks like the dudes at Plex were kinda rude to ironbill from navi-x so he seemed to take that as "not interested" and left it at that, nobody else picked up the ball and boxee is pretty much dead except for ios, so moving on and seeing if xbmc is acceptable to the wife, it is similar enough to boxee, but boxee did a lot better job of identifying and sorting media, xbmc seems to have issue with tv and movies being all in the same directory (we just download all torrents to an unsorted folder and don't unrar them).

The kitchen pc will be a sff Atom D525 based box, only requirements beyond that are cheap, small, vesa mountable, and hdmi. I'm looking to spend well under $300 on that box, but may go with a prebuilt Lenovo for around $360 just because.

vdp donkey
gmc inspire • sarcasm while you wait

DigiCorn

I didn't pay for Roksbox. I'm on a free trial to see if I like it better than Roku's media channel. I have AT&T, which is allowed for ESPN3. PlayOn has excellent streaming of ESPN3 on Roku, from what I've heard. But you have to have the LT Roku - not the Roku 2. PlayOn does not work for any Roku 2.
Quote from: t-pat on February 27, 2012, 03:26:58 PM
Quote from: DigiCorn on February 27, 2012, 02:09:02 PMPlayOn works for the Wii... and I spoke to a guy at Naxi-X who says development is all but over for Plex and PlayOn, which means forget about using Navi-X on anything other than a media PC. It "works" on Boxee, but he says to use XBMC if you want it to work best. Here's a cool site with stealth media PCs: http://xbmc.org/natethomas/2011/11/26/feature-friday-hidden-htpcs/

I haven't turned on the wii in months so doesn't matter. I think I used tversity with it and it "worked" but was so poky that it wasn't pleasurable to deal with.

Navi-x "worked" on boxee, but not as well as xbmc.

Looks like the dudes at Plex were kinda rude to ironbill from navi-x so he seemed to take that as "not interested" and left it at that, nobody else picked up the ball and boxee is pretty much dead except for ios, so moving on and seeing if xbmc is acceptable to the wife, it is similar enough to boxee, but boxee did a lot better job of identifying and sorting media, xbmc seems to have issue with tv and movies being all in the same directory (we just download all torrents to an unsorted folder and don't unrar them).

The kitchen pc will be a sff Atom D525 based box, only requirements beyond that are cheap, small, vesa mountable, and hdmi. I'm looking to spend well under $300 on that box, but may go with a prebuilt Lenovo for around $360 just because.
Rude was an understatement. I reread those posts about 3 times to make sure I understood. The Plex guys were assholes.
"There's been a lot of research recently on how hard it is to dislodge an impression once it's been implanted in someone's mind. (This is why political attack ads don't have to be true to be effective. The other side can point out their inaccuracies, but the voter's mind privileges the memory of the original accusation, which was juicier than any counterargument ever could be.)"
― Johnny Carson

"Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it."
– Nikki Sixx

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
― Ernest Hemingway

t-pat

the plex guys seem like assholes in general. They took out rar playback support and just blew off everyone asking wtf please put it back, responses like "don't be so lazy, unrar your stuff and organize it" or "go buy another hard drive so you have room" - that's just dumb.
vdp donkey
gmc inspire • sarcasm while you wait

Farabomb

Personally, I'm OCD with my files so I unrar and organize everything so that wouldn't bother me. The fact that they removed it and answer with comments like that is just dickish. If you changed code and it's a bitch to go back, say that. No need to be a dick.
Speed doesn't kill, rapidly becoming stationary is the problem

I'd rather have stories told than be telling stories of what I could have done.

Quote from: Ear on April 06, 2016, 11:54:16 AM
Quote from: Farabomb on April 06, 2016, 11:39:41 AMIt's more like grip, grip, grip, noise, then spin and 2 feet in and feel shame.
I once knew a plus-sized girl and this pretty much describes teh secks. :rotf:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
         —Benjamin Franklin

My other job

Joe

Quote from: t-pat on February 27, 2012, 03:26:58 PM
Quote from: DigiCorn on February 27, 2012, 02:09:02 PMPlayOn works for the Wii... and I spoke to a guy at Naxi-X who says development is all but over for Plex and PlayOn, which means forget about using Navi-X on anything other than a media PC. It "works" on Boxee, but he says to use XBMC if you want it to work best. Here's a cool site with stealth media PCs: http://xbmc.org/natethomas/2011/11/26/feature-friday-hidden-htpcs/

I haven't turned on the wii in months so doesn't matter. I think I used tversity with it and it "worked" but was so poky that it wasn't pleasurable to deal with.

Navi-x "worked" on boxee, but not as well as xbmc.

Looks like the dudes at Plex were kinda rude to ironbill from navi-x so he seemed to take that as "not interested" and left it at that, nobody else picked up the ball and boxee is pretty much dead except for ios, so moving on and seeing if xbmc is acceptable to the wife, it is similar enough to boxee, but boxee did a lot better job of identifying and sorting media, xbmc seems to have issue with tv and movies being all in the same directory (we just download all torrents to an unsorted folder and don't unrar them).

The kitchen pc will be a sff Atom D525 based box, only requirements beyond that are cheap, small, vesa mountable, and hdmi. I'm looking to spend well under $300 on that box, but may go with a prebuilt Lenovo for around $360 just because.

XBMC is my fav among it, Boxxee, ad Plex at the moment. The Netflix plugin for XBMC sucks ass but it's not made by the XBMC developers so I can't complain about it. I don't need it now anyway as I can do Netflix on the blu-ray in the living room and from the Roku in the family room. I was gifted a PC over the weekend that has an AMD Athlon 64 single core processor with a 1 gb video adapter w/hdmi so I'm hoping that will be strong enough to drive XBMC. Just need a remote receiver for it now but I have to get it hooked up and see if it's enough CPU to handle it.

TV/Movies in the same directory is a problem because you pick the scraper per folder. Either a movie or TV scraper. Whichever one you pick is probably not going to find the other info. But I've had some issues with XMBC trying to identify a TV show and it misses by a mile to something completely unrelated.
Mac OS Sonoma 14.2.1 (c) | (retired)

The seven ages of man: spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills and wills.

Joe

Quote from: Farabomb on February 27, 2012, 04:06:08 PMPersonally, I'm OCD with my files so I unrar and organize everything so that wouldn't bother me. The fact that they removed it and answer with comments like that is just dickish. If you changed code and it's a bitch to go back, say that. No need to be a dick.

I do that too. Plus it causes additional overhead for the media server to have to unrar them.
Mac OS Sonoma 14.2.1 (c) | (retired)

The seven ages of man: spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills and wills.

t-pat

Quote from: Joe on February 27, 2012, 04:12:33 PM
Quote from: Farabomb on February 27, 2012, 04:06:08 PMPersonally, I'm OCD with my files so I unrar and organize everything so that wouldn't bother me. The fact that they removed it and answer with comments like that is just dickish. If you changed code and it's a bitch to go back, say that. No need to be a dick.

I do that too. Plus it causes additional overhead for the media server to have to unrar them.

I just want to watch tv, I uncompress and organize files all day, and doing that with a remote control or even the wireless keyboard/touchpad deal is tedious, I have to pull up a chair closer to the tv so I can actually read what is going on. Ruins my 15' experience. The wife is the primary downloader and she's damn sure not going to take the time to unrar and organize files to watch once and delete.

As far as overhead, it's running a Core Quad 2.9xxghz processor and that's been able to handle just about everything rared, even ginormous .mkv bluray rips, with the occasional need to unrar something, but most of what we watch is tv shows so they aren't usually huge.
vdp donkey
gmc inspire • sarcasm while you wait

DigiCorn

Quote from: Joe on February 27, 2012, 04:11:30 PMJust need a remote receiver for it now but I have to get it hooked up and see if it's enough CPU to handle it.
More RAM, but don't buy it from Apple. Actually, I don't know if thats good advice or not, but I heard it somewhere.

When you say remote receiver, do you mean an adapter that allows it to receive remote control commands, a remote control, or a wifi/wired connection?

XBMC has an app for Android, but I don't know about iPhone. I'm using the remote for Roku, and it's a tad sensitive, but works great.
"There's been a lot of research recently on how hard it is to dislodge an impression once it's been implanted in someone's mind. (This is why political attack ads don't have to be true to be effective. The other side can point out their inaccuracies, but the voter's mind privileges the memory of the original accusation, which was juicier than any counterargument ever could be.)"
― Johnny Carson

"Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it."
– Nikki Sixx

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
― Ernest Hemingway

Joe

Quote from: DigiCorn on February 27, 2012, 04:37:32 PM
Quote from: Joe on February 27, 2012, 04:11:30 PMJust need a remote receiver for it now but I have to get it hooked up and see if it's enough CPU to handle it.
More RAM, but don't buy it from Apple. Actually, I don't know if thats good advice or not, but I heard it somewhere.

When you say remote receiver, do you mean an adapter that allows it to receive remote control commands, a remote control, or a wifi/wired connection?

XBMC has an app for Android, but I don't know about iPhone. I'm using the remote for Roku, and it's a tad sensitive, but works great.

USB receiver and remote is what I mean. The mac has the built in receiver with the remote but the PC does not.
Mac OS Sonoma 14.2.1 (c) | (retired)

The seven ages of man: spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills and wills.

Nick Burns

Oh by the way, YOU'RE WELCOME!