Looking for new media players


voldak

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I'm the author of the original version.

 

I'm not involved with it now, I have no idea if it's still used or developed. I ditched my Mede8er stuff right after I found out that it had been ripped off.

 

I love XBMC, but am still working on getting to a suitable level of WAF. To be honest it's not far off I just need to finish setting up my remote and do some educating.

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You can get the barebones Celeron NUC for $145 bucks on Newegg. All you need to buy is a $20 SO-DIMM of RAM and a USB stick for it to boot OpenELEC or the Plex version of OpenELEC. So for $170-$175 you could have a fully capable set up. If you go the eBay route for can find the Celeron NUC for even cheaper, and often times brand new. I see some of them going for $125 new on eBay.

 

 

A majority of mine are now x264 (probably over the last 2 years), but I still have a lot of old xvid videos. I'll have to hook back up the RPi and test it out again.

 

 

The problem I have had in the past with batch encoding is that I have different bit rates and qualities for a lot of my videos. If there was a way for the re-encoding to match the quality of the source it would be great.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

 

I'm not aware of any batching tools that can determine the quality of the source file to set the output quality. However, if you know which files are which quality you could always batch them by quality so you could batch the poor quality videos at a lower quality output and the better quality videos at a better quality output setting and so on.

 

I weighed a lot of other options and I think for the price/functionality that the Intel NUC is the way to go. I don't need much, just simple play back, that supports a wide variety of codecs is what I need.

 

I've got Plex setup on the server and that's the way I want to go with my future players.

 

I've done a bit of google-fu on the Plex version of OpenELEC, but my results have been random.

 

Where would you recommend to download the Plex version of OpenELEC?

 

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Where would you recommend to download the Plex version of OpenELEC?

https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/87943-openelec-plex-home-theater-the-all-in-one-pht-distro/

 

Thank you very much!

 

I'm hoping that the Celeron NUC will do what I need. Thanks for all of the help everyone!

 

You should be fine with that NUC. I have the Celeron NUC running OpenELEC XBMC and it works great - for Plex it should be a no-brainer since all the processing is done on the backend.

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Where would you recommend to download the Plex version of OpenELEC?

https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/87943-openelec-plex-home-theater-the-all-in-one-pht-distro/

 

Thank you very much!

 

I'm hoping that the Celeron NUC will do what I need. Thanks for all of the help everyone!

 

You should be fine with that NUC. I have the Celeron NUC running OpenELEC XBMC and it works great - for Plex it should be a no-brainer since all the processing is done on the backend.

 

Awesome. Thanks for the vote of confidence. I've got the newer model ordered (BOXDN2820FYKH0). I'm just hoping that some retailers get them in stock quickly.

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Awesome. Thanks for the vote of confidence. I've got the newer model ordered (BOXDN2820FYKH0). I'm just hoping that some retailers get them in stock quickly.

 

For some reason it appears no-one has those in stock. I was looking at ordering a couple but there is no stock anywhere. I called one retailer and they said even their supplier shows negative stock (-20 or -30 units) which is other retailer's orders not being fulfilled yet.

 

The older 847 and all the I3/I5's are available, but the new Celeron's seem to have disappeared.

 

Hopefully this changes soon.

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  • 3 months later...

I have refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre's with a fanless HD5450 LP card installed running OpenELEC 4.0.7. works flawlessly.

 

The beauty of the thinkcentre's is that they are plentiful, cheap, fully spec'd out & ready to run (no need to buy ram, hdd, etc. like a NUC), well built, and quiet.

 

They can be had for under $125 + $30 for the HD5450. they come with win7 usually (if you want that sort of thing) and KB/Mouse.

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Hold off until later this month when the different ChromeBox models come out. More than likely, we will see OpenElec builds appear for it in no time. Granted its only a celeron CPU with a HD4000 GPU, it should be able to handle any video format along with any skins on it. I have a Foxconn AMD E-350 HTPC which by all means is slow as shit but it handles XBMC without any issues and any media format thrown at.

 

Sent from my LG-VS980 using Tapatalk

 

How is your E-350 configured?

 

I have one with a 4 GB stick in it (because it's the only computer I have that boots this particular stick... which is boggling). I set 256 or 512 of the RAM to the GPU in BIOS, and have it booting OpenELEC off an old 2 GB USB stick. It plays back everything I've thrown at it, including 1080P Hi10P anime with FLAC (all processor decoding) without any hiccups over a 50 Mb/s MOCA connection using old Verizon Actiontec routers. It also did said playback just fine with a 2 GB stick in it.

 

Granted, my setup in my space is... multifaceted, to say the least.

 

Simply put, I have my primary HTPC which has a Ceton InfiTV 4 (original crazy high price one too... the price drops I've seen hurt). Which has an icon in Media Center to launch XBMC and when it closes relaunch Media Center. I have two XBox 360s that I use as extenders for my bed room and guest room. That all works perfectly... until the Media Center unit decides it wanted to lock up instead of going to sleep.

 

As far as the rest of this thread goes, I prefer XBMC, I actually have setting it up down to a science now that I've played with it a fair bit.

I have two profiles one regular one for adult content, I have them all synced with MySQL (I don't use the headless docker due to the profiles, I may eventually after more research).

Once I made the profiles on the machines, I just make sure that the XBMC setting folder is shared (except on OpenELEC it is already shared by default, so I get to skip this step).

I copy over my sources.xml, advancedsettings.xml, and then my 2.0 audio guisettings.xml as the two secondary boxes aren't 5.1 capable TVs.

 

They do playback at 24/30/60 as appropriate, convert the stuff that my TVs don't handle (25/50/random internet crappy encode at a funny frame rate just because) to the nearest frame rate up.

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Personally and I know this is a random in a string of posts already, but:

 

Server sides, so far I've toyed with: Twonky (most hardware DLNA out there now), lots of random transcoder/media server installs and pairings (win & Linux), and most recently Plex.

 

Clients: RasberryPi, Apple TV, Playstation 3 & 4, Xbox's, several low grade media fronts (samsung smarts, LG, etc etc), Boxee Box, Amazon Fire TV & Roku's.

 

Low maintenance that plays everything in both HD and full surround without need to be micro managing file types or encoding platforms and stays super responsive, the best pair I've found so far: Plex + Roku 3's (rarflix installed).

 

Can't beat it. Best platform for stability, speed and universal application (and trust me I've literally tried almost everything worth any salt).

 

I virtualize and test new stuff I find probably weekly, so if anyone has a different opinion throw it at me. :

 

-Colter

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PCH A-410 (or even old C-200) with YAMJ/Eversion (in addition to the NMJ Navigator for iPad) is the way to go. Server side unRAID. PCH does all formats, never freezes, zero admin. Up to 1080p and HD-audio via HDMI to a capable preamp (or SPDIF only for core audio). It is network connection only and you can do more than 10 clients/rooms. No glitches and problems for years. This is almost on par with a Kaleidescape system. However, one needs to be a little Linux-savvy on the sever-side though, but this is true for unRAID as well.

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Is there anything out there that has a space for a small DVD drive?

 

Well, you could probably use a Raspberry Pi (or equivalent with an approved USB drive (external power would be good, or a hub). There are also some small PC cases that have support for DVD drives. It also depends on what you intend to use the drive for, actual DVD playback or data disc. I'm pretty happy with XBMC on Linux USB implementation (auto-mount drive as partition name, no lettering issue like Windows has with USB HDDs). I would imagine it does the same with discs, but haven't tried it out on a Linux base.

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I am going to guess that none of the small standalone media clients is going to support a DVD drive. Maybe a Pi would, but I don't know if it has enough juice to do so, and who knows what the playback would be like (Pi is pretty crappy to begin with in my opinion).

 

You are likely going to need to look at an Intel NUC or equivalent, but it's still going to require an external DVD drive.

 

Your other option is put together a small PC for her... you can likely get something fairly small that can sit under a TV, but you are likely into the $400-500 range all put together.

 

These media clients are not really geared to physical media - more just playback of data files.

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Great read!!  It's interesting to see how far htpc's have come.  I settled on the Dune players back a long time ago because as others have said I wanted it to work and didn't want to fuss.  I have rarely used bluray iso but having that capability is important--there's nothing more annoying to me than being limited by a technology. 

 

Interesting stuff about the Roku3 and plex--I have a roku3 connected to every TV for Netflix/amazon/hulu.  I'll have to try plex and see how it does!

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I have tried many different solutions and now Im using an Intel NUC i5 D54250WYK with the built in IR in a tranquil PC passive case running openELEC with Aeon MQ5 skin. It looks great, is so small, the XBMC interface using the Aeon MQ5 skin looks great as well. Its a dream to use. I use an original Microsoft windows media centre remote and it boots in 10 seconds and starts playing my blu-ray MKV's in 3 seconds from unRAID. I don't know if the celeron version has the IR built onto the board but that was a deal breaker for me being able to turn on and off from the remote control.

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