3 ms·

Well you make it sound so easy! An issue with the technology is trying to keep up with it. I have a basic HD tv (a samsung), it's not smart. It will play med

Well you make it sound so easy! An issue with the technology is trying to keep up with it. I have a basic HD tv (a samsung), it's not smart. It will play media from USB, and it plays a lot of formats - only it suffers with a few annoying quirks. I have sizing issues with the picture, and the media player doesn't let me turn the screen off. It almost works. DVD playback is pretty poor too with a separate LG player. I don't want to run a separate media centre machine or NAS, all I want to do, is plug a drive into the TV. I don't even care for the IMDB stuff. Just the basics, easily locate file quickly, play it, play it from where I last paused etc. A Pi sounds promising - though I wonder how good the actual picture would be. Everytime I've tried XBMC or some such on a computer, the picture never appears that smooth. Not everyone has a smart phone either. What I'd like is something like a Tablet, with HDMI out, and an SD card, and/or USB port - that I could quickly attach to the TV. The basics feel neglected.

antocv 13y ago
"Plug it in and turn your dumb HD tv into a 'Smart'" schenaningans is on the market, if you duck it there are several such USB-sticks, but I dont know how good any of them are. Its more fun making your own I belive, and you get to play with raspberry if you go that route. Ive tried a Pi model B with XBMC and the output of it is indeed 1080p and looking smooth, it can play an HD file without stuttering/lagging over samba over openvpn. On the openvpn/samba server I have 30mbit up/down and Pi has 54mbit wifi then ADSL with up to 20mbit down. Hm, if you dont want the Pi route, perhaps getting the cheapest andorid tablet with hdmi out would do well, as you can run a upnp-renderer on it, the tablet should have wifi as well. But then youd still have to run a dlna server on some of your computers, for example on laptop.
- inthewind 13y ago
  Thanks, can the Pi with Plex or XBMC, play straight from say a USB hard drive? What's the audio quality like on it?
  - antocv 13y ago
    There is no reason why it wouldnt play straight from a USB hard drive - but it only has 2 usb ports so keep that in mind, I used both of them - wireless keyboard/mouse and wifi. You do need to know some Linux commands, I doubt/havent tried to see if XBMC can auto-mount things inserted. But that would be cool if it worked like that. Perhaps the raspbmc distribution has the automount setup done for you. Audio quality, only had TV speakers to "try" it out with, sounded just like any other content, so I cant tell you if it suits for a high-end audio system, but the audio-over-hdmi worked with no fiddling from my side.
  - gman99 13y ago
    The Pi with OpenElec (XBMC) automounts USB drives. The onboard audio is supposed to not be great (crackles when there is USB load? Not sure if this is fixed). But if you're using the audio over HDMI to play through your TV, it should be fine. OpenELEC also supports CEC so you can use your TV remote to directly control XBMC.

antocv 13y ago

"Plug it in and turn your dumb HD tv into a 'Smart'" schenaningans is on the market, if you duck it there are several such USB-sticks, but I dont know how good any of them are. Its more fun making your own I belive, and you get to play with raspberry if you go that route. Ive tried a Pi model B with XBMC and the output of it is indeed 1080p and looking smooth, it can play an HD file without stuttering/lagging over samba over openvpn. On the openvpn/samba server I have 30mbit up/down and Pi has 54mbit wifi then ADSL with up to 20mbit down. Hm, if you dont want the Pi route, perhaps getting the cheapest andorid tablet with hdmi out would do well, as you can run a upnp-renderer on it, the tablet should have wifi as well. But then youd still have to run a dlna server on some of your computers, for example on laptop.

inthewind 13y ago
Thanks, can the Pi with Plex or XBMC, play straight from say a USB hard drive? What's the audio quality like on it?
- antocv 13y ago
  There is no reason why it wouldnt play straight from a USB hard drive - but it only has 2 usb ports so keep that in mind, I used both of them - wireless keyboard/mouse and wifi. You do need to know some Linux commands, I doubt/havent tried to see if XBMC can auto-mount things inserted. But that would be cool if it worked like that. Perhaps the raspbmc distribution has the automount setup done for you. Audio quality, only had TV speakers to "try" it out with, sounded just like any other content, so I cant tell you if it suits for a high-end audio system, but the audio-over-hdmi worked with no fiddling from my side.
- gman99 13y ago
  The Pi with OpenElec (XBMC) automounts USB drives. The onboard audio is supposed to not be great (crackles when there is USB load? Not sure if this is fixed). But if you're using the audio over HDMI to play through your TV, it should be fine. OpenELEC also supports CEC so you can use your TV remote to directly control XBMC.