WDTV/ Roku Streamers

Roku + Plex = beautiful. I stream 1080p movies over my N grade wifi with no problems. Just watched Amazing Spiderman today. It's so freaking easy too.

I have roku, 2x boxee, old mythtv htpc, googleTV, supergamingPC attached to 60" led, xbox, ps3, new smart LG/Samsung TV with all apps, etc between me and my relatives houses. boxee is king by far, the UI and remote control are far superior to the others. It also natively plays the most video formats (except for my gaming PC of course) and has the best set of apps.

Roku is ok but its shitty at mkv, you have to have plex and stuff on a PC to transcode, whereas boxee can just see it as SMB shares and plays it straight up, even out of RAR files! For 1080p movies, you pretty much need a external USB drive or wired connection, wireless is too slow. At my parents house I have a 1gb (unpowered) USB drive attached to the boxee, and when I visit I bring a 64GB flash drive with a few movies for them to watch, takes a few minutes to copy to the drive. Boxee also works with new downloaded 3D movies (OU or 1/2 SBS format, not full SBS), although subtitles generally don't work.

If all you want is Netflix or amazon VOD, newer TVs come with all that shit built in. My dads samsung even has DNLA and USB support so it could theoretically play plexee served files or a thumbUSB, but the UI is seriously horrible and I'd never see him figuring it out in a million years.

You can get pretty complex with the boxee too if you attach a $100 1-2TB drive, like the drive is shareable on a SMB/linux network so you could setup a wintask or cron job to copy over new torrented files every day at midnight, and remote control into your PC to download torrents into a special Boxee-share folder. For my wife in the bedroom boxee, I copy over her retarded foreign soap opera films every night and she can pick which ones she wants to get next via a torrent RSS feed on her ipad.

I've had a WDTV Live for probably 3 years or more now. Works great, works fine with MKVs, and every file type I've thrown at it. I have it wired though, so I can't comment on how it does wirelessly with streaming 1080p. My only gripe about the WDTV Live is that the remote is tiny and easy to misplace...it's probably about the size of a normal garage door opener remote, or a micro-laptop mouse. Also it's not illuminated, so it's hard to see what buttons you are hitting when watching a movie in the dark.

Qnap NAS and a DLNA TV. Samsung sets are pretty amazing in what they offer now and well worth it.

I have a Roku in the bedroom and we love it. Dumped cable/sat a year ago and don't really miss it. The living room is the gaming area. Xbox and ps3 to a decent Sony LCD. The ps3 is just a glorified bluray player.

I've been thinking of doing a media pc in the living room. Have a i5 2500k w a ATI 6950 that never gets used. What would be the best way to start with that?

Just random movies and such

WDTV is great for one thing, plug and play many formats. It's perfect for me and retard mode usage, doesn't do HD wireless streaming worth a fuck. But there's just way better options out there now if you look, especially for streaming media stuff.

But for me? Torrent whatever I want, throw it on USB stick, plug it in. Plays everything I've thrown at it. I'll upgrade eventually, but had no reason to yet personally.

Not sure how the WDTV Hub thing works though, with the built in hard drive and more streaming options.

Thorne_sl said:

I've been thinking of doing a media pc in the living room. Have a i5 2500k w a ATI 6950 that never gets used. What would be the best way to start with that?

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Get the tiniest enclosure you can, there are a bunch on newegg. You can hook up a OTA antenna if you want to get the local channels in HD, and all the media software supports PVRing stuff too. Worth it for sports and stuff, other shows are all torrentable. Get a cheap bluray drive in it too ($40 or less) for those random DVDs or audio CDs. Get at least a 2-3TB drive, with room for a second drive in the future. Internal is better than external imo.

If there is any way to have a wired connection for your media PC, do that. Wifi is ok, but you will end up waiting for shit and wifes don't like that, plus remote desktop control is much faster over wired. Wifi will work fine though, just have to plan ahead a little more. As said get a nice wireless remote, you can use a ultraslim keyboard/mouse combo one but for the wife I'd suggest using an iOS or android app, if she has a smartphone. or a ultra simple bluetooth/IR logitech remote.

I'd recomend plex or windows media center as your htpc software. You will want to think carefully about how you "feed" video in, you want to do it as painlessly as possible. Suggest a large enough hard drive on the htpc itself (not your main PC), and a torrent software that supports remote access. Setup RSS feeds from your favorite torrent sites, and use the HTPC frontend, android access, or your main PC to pick and choose which torrents to download, and delete. You really want the torrents to be right on the HTPC itself, copying them back and forth from your main PC gets very tiresome. The HTPC can act as a share as well to feed ps3, roku, boxee, etc to other TVs in the house or to smartphones/tablets/laptops.

Obviously setup your firewall to allow your htpc torrent access, remote torrent sites will see both your main PC and htpc as the same "source" so you can download from both no problems, at least I have so far.

Thanks for the info! Is there are problem with the HTPC being my main pc? The rig mentioned above is my gaming machine but since I haven't played an MMO in a year it just sits. I use my iPad for general browsing and consoles for gaming since the 8 yr old has started getti g into them.

... Double post!

we ditched cable about 2 years ago, rocking Hulu Plus and Netflix and loving it. we just got amazon prime just for the shipping and discounts, the streaming there doesn't seem to offer anything we want that couldn't already get for free. might be tempted to buy an episode of game of thrones if my 'other' sources aren't available in time come march.

I've got a media center PC. my first one was juts my old gaming system I upgraded. When it finally died, I built one from scratch in a media pc case. sit in the stand under my tv and looks like a receiver. here's a great site for picking how much processing power you need:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=94199

if you're building new, the new I3 procs w/ intel 4000 integrated video will do just about anything, so no need for an upgraded video card. toss in 8gb of ram and an ssd and you'll have a quiet and cool system.

the review for the boxee here have been helpful to me, as we're thinking of getting another setup in the bedroom since our main system downstairs is stuck on Dora the Explorer thanks to my 3 year old. I think the Boxee (or something similar in size) would work fine for the bedroom with a decent 40+ LCD. I don't know how well those smart TVs can stream stored movies/shows from our NAS.

for the living room, my wife will sometimes do some simple Office apps and web surfing, so windows OS feels more needed.

assuming a good wireless N connection, can the Boxee box stream 1080p from a NAS ok?

I have a WDTV Live. I just set up a Samba/Window share off my Linux box and play away.