Media Centre PC?

[anonymous-user]

Hi, like many people I have DVDs, Bluerays, a big collection of MP3s which I'd like to access from one place. At the moment I have a WD TV media player for Netflix and playing music through my connected Hifi but it's slow and crap if I'm honest. I have a decent 50" TV & Blueray player and what I'd like is something which is fast, internet connected that can stream or play all my media. I also have a Freesat PVR! Any ideas how I can bring all this together into one, easily accessible and easy to use place? Should I buy a PC?

Thanks.

[anonymous-user]

Yeah, I did work that out - thanks. That's part of my frustration, if I want to listen to music I need to plug in a USB hard drive which takes ages to start working! My HiFi sounds great but plays CDs, yes I could get an iPod dock or similar but that only fixes one problem. Ideally I's like to pull MP3, VOD, DVD/Blueray and other internet services (& Freesat) altogether into one place. I can then connect it to a decent amp/speakers and my TV.

[PhilboSE]

I've played with media players built into a variety of devices and have ultimately decided they come up short, either in the compatibility stakes or in the UI.

So I've gone down the route of a home-built NAS based on an HP microserver with 4x3Tb disks in RAID5 booting NAS4free off a USB, and a variety of media devices scattered around the house. The best media devices I've put together are the Intel NUCs, booting OpenELEC. They have the grunt to handle all tasks (like rich XBMC UI and all decoding tasks) yet are small, cheap and run quiet.

All the software is Open Source, including what I use for ripping, so the only cost is hardware, and the above is pretty cheap. Audio files stream to my hi-fi (Cambridge Audio Stream Magic) and I store DVDs and Blu-rays in native form. Be aware that a raw Blu-ray rip can be 30Gb in size and needs a reliable 50Mbps bandwidth to stream without buffering, so storage and network performance need to be up to that job unless you start compressing the files (I don't, because I've got big screens and a projector, and they show up compression artifacts more distinctly).

[marctwo]

PhilboSE said:

I've played with media players built into a variety of devices and have ultimately decided they come up short, either in the compatibility stakes or in the UI.

So I've gone down the route of a home-built NAS based on an HP microserver with 4x3Tb disks in RAID5 booting NAS4free off a USB, and a variety of media devices scattered around the house. The best media devices I've put together are the Intel NUCs, booting OpenELEC. They have the grunt to handle all tasks (like rich XBMC UI and all decoding tasks) yet are small, cheap and run quiet.

All the software is Open Source, including what I use for ripping, so the only cost is hardware, and the above is pretty cheap. Audio files stream to my hi-fi (Cambridge Audio Stream Magic) and I store DVDs and Blu-rays in native form. Be aware that a raw Blu-ray rip can be 30Gb in size and needs a reliable 50Mbps bandwidth to stream without buffering, so storage and network performance need to be up to that job unless you start compressing the files (I don't, because I've got big screens and a projector, and they show up compression artifacts more distinctly).

This is clearly a good solution but the NUC is very expensive. For the cheapskate option have a look at Raspbmc on the Raspberry Pi.

[PhilboSE]

marctwo said:

This is clearly a good solution but the NUC is very expensive. For the cheapskate option have a look at Raspbmc on the Raspberry Pi.

Yup, played with the Pi for years. As I contributed (in a very minor way) to early versions of the Linux kernel, it was like 1990 all over again!

The Pi can just about keep up with the hardware decoding, but it has issues with passthrough of some of the audio streams over HDMI, IIRC (this situation may have changed subsequently, of course).

The main blocker for me though is that I really like the InfoWall video selection screen on XBMC with the Aeon Nox skin, and this isn't hardware accelerated on the Pi and it just doesn't have the CPU chops for the video handling and scripting overheads of the skin. I also have a very big video library and all the metadata for the films is more than the Pi can shuffle from USB storage devices. If the Confluence skin had a decent InfoWall alternative it might just be an option, but it's too much of a slideshow on my preferred settings.

A decent Pi setup to handle XBMC runs to about £50 (assuming you want a case, and a power supply, and the decoding licences, and a big USB stick and...), so although the NUCs cost me around three times that, I've found them by far the best option for my purposes.

[anonymous-user]

Thanks. So I can get a NAS media server with DLNA. Next question, what do I use to access my media and play through the TV/HiFi? WD tv is a bit pants, are there better clients that are easier , more reliable to use?

[wiffmaster]

PhilboSE said:

The best media devices I've put together are the Intel NUCs, booting OpenELEC.

That's exactly what I'm running and it's a brilliant combination. I've used/built plenty of media streamers over the years, but this setup is absolutely ideal. Handles anything you throw at it, updates automatically, can be controlled using an Android/iPhone app and is tiny and silent.

[PhilboSE]

wormus said:

Thanks. So I can get a NAS media server with DLNA. Next question, what do I use to access my media and play through the TV/HiFi? WD tv is a bit pants, are there better clients that are easier , more reliable to use?

You'll need a streaming media playback device of some sort. There are hundreds, ranging from cheap to expensive appliances, to build your own like the NUC/OpenELEC combination mentioned already.

Unfortunately it's a complete minefield of standards and compatability. Lots of appliances don't support all the streaming formats you may want to use, or don't output 1080p, or similar. The media playback device will need video and audio out to support both formats, of course. I don't know much about the audio performance of these devices as I use a dedicated hifi device for this. If you media playback device has an audio out you should be able to link it directly to your amp.

Controlling these devices is the next trick, you'll need a UI somewhere of course. Most (all?) support control via the TV screen and sometimes a remote, whilst you may prefer to use an app on a smartphone.

To avoid buying twice you'll need to decide on the formats you'll use to store your content and then match your device to that. In my research the cheaper devices all came up short in one way or another, which is why I settled on the NUC/OpenELEC combination. But YMMV.

[anonymous-user]

ash73 said:

There are various other appliances at a similar price point to the WDTV, and there are blueray players and TVs with built-in media players, but they don't play as many different formats as the WDTV.

I just want to check you understood what I was suggesting, feel free to skip this if I'm stating the obvious! On the WDTV if you press the red button you can connect to a media server, or a network share, or a local USB drive. If you pick the former it will find all the DLNA servers on your network, it doesn't use the media library and it's much faster to navigate. In other words if you set up a NAS (or PC) as a DLNA server with all your media on it, the WDTV just acts as a DLNA client and plays it on the TV. I'm very happy with my WDTV in this scenario.

But if you've had enough of the WDTV, the NUC/OpenELEC combination suggested by PhilboSE is a good step up. You could even install Windows on it so you could run a browser on the telly too.

Thanks for the explanation, yes I understand - I'm just looking at options as I don't like the WDTV interface that much and it has moments where it freezes or needs a reboot.

I'm not familiar with NUC/OpenElec. I think what you are saying is I buy something like this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=sea... and install OpenElec on an external drive which I boot from?

Do any of these little boxes come with a remote control and are they difficult to set up? One with a solid state HDD would work best I guess? What's the best "appliance" on the market?