Media player advice

[swells]

Hello forums - A little background first. I have been using unraid for ~6 months or so and love it. Initially, the easiest thing i found to do that worked for me was to have ps3mediaserver on my Windows 7 machine with the unraid box as the shared media. Since my Samsung tv has DLNA, i can then view and stream 99% of the content directly on my tv. This works great, but the UI built into the Samsung player sucks. I am now looking at other options.

 

I have seen some threads here with YAMJ and others and like the look of having movie boxes and sometimes IMDB info on all the media. I have a few concerns/questions about this if anyone can help me. I am open to almost anything with a nice UI and which will stream straight from unraid to a STB.

 

In order to show Bluray/DVD boxes and IMDB info, does the media need to be in a specific format? 95% of my content is from torrents and is in various formats. (MKV, AVI, etc.)

 

I am not againt a STB such as PCH or something similar as long as its not too expensive and will work for sure. My current setup works. My biggest things are getting rid of my windows machine as a middle man between unraid and my tv and the UI.

[jay964]

Right now I'm using a WDTV LIVE STB.  Works really well and no middleman needed.  I think it maxes out at about a video bitrate of 20MBPS.  My unit is pretty old so I'm sure the new ones dont have this limitation. 

[lionelhutz]

Something like XBMC or MediaBrowser will search and download all of the nice pictures and data as long as you have the media files in a proper directory structure with proper naming. You need a full PC to run these though, so they're not very inexpensive. However, maybe your W7 PC can be re-tasked to connect directly.

 

It seems to me that other solutions such as media players (Popcorn Hour, WD-Live etc) can do the same but I believe you have to manually create the data, such as a movie sheet, for most or all of these players.

 

Peter

 

[Rajahal]

Roku and AppleTV both have XBMC and Plex add-ons that I've read work pretty well (I haven't used them personally).  Both devices cost $100 or less.  They won't give you as much flexibility as a full XBMC ION build, but they also cost about 1/3rd of the price.  If you do want a full-fledged HTPC, then I would recommend installing XBMC Live onto the newest version of the Zbox.  I think that box is an incredible value, considering that it comes with RAM, a HDD, and a slim DVD drive (which can be upgraded to BluRay for about $150).  I would recommend upgrading the HDD to an SSD as well, but that's also optional.

[joshpond]

I'm running PCh with YAMJ so this is my view:

 

In order to show Bluray/DVD boxes and IMDB info, does the media need to be in a specific format? 95% of my content is from torrents and is in various formats. (MKV, AVI, etc.)

 

The format doesn't really matter for creating the walls but having the files name correctly does make it better at automatically scraping the data.

 

YAMJ can be setup and pointed at the movies and told to create the movie walls and the automatically scrape the data. If the movies aren't named correctly it will have more trouble and pick the wrong moives to get the data for.

 

You can use a program like Ember media manager which will also automatically scrape data and save the files (eg imdb data and pictures) needed by YAMJ and point YAMJ to use those files (so it doesn't scrape) The ones that Ember gets wrong you can go back and edit.

 

You do have to remember that it is static. If you add a new movie, unless you run YAMJ again it won't show up in the wall. (you can automate YAMJ to run at a certain time everyday)

 

I like the PCH just for WAF and it will play BD.isos too.

 

Josh

[audiophile42]

I used to have a wdtv, which worked fine for just basic file playback. I switched to a full HTPC running mediabrowser. It pulls artwork, imdb info, and is configured with media player classic to playback bluray rips at 1080p24 and bitstream dts-hd-ma/true hd. Slick interface with no compromise on the audio and video quality. It also works very well with downloaded tv series. AVSForum has a bunch of really good info if you decide to go down the htpc route. I found that all the other set top boxes had some kind of compromise that you don't run into with a pc.

[swells]

After i did some reading yesterday, i went home and updated to unRAID 5.0beta13 which was surprisingly simple. I then installed Plex on the server and started adding media. After i had a good chunk of movies on there i grabbed the iOS app for Plex and played with it on my ipad. I really like the interface and the features it provides, huge upgrade from the default UI i was using on my TV. I ordered an Apple TV based off of what i read about Apple TV vs. Roku as far as Plex was concerned. Apple TV will be here today. This seems like it will be prefect for what I was looking for since i have an Iphone 4S and and an Ipad to add to the Apple TV. I was really impressed with how simple the Plex install was on the unRAID box, couldn't have been any easier.

 

Im glad these forums exist, everything i want to try to do, someone else has already done it and written a nice how to. Thanks again to everyone who contributes here and makes unRAID more impressive every day.