Hey guys

 

Sorry if this has been asked before, but I searched and didn't get a decent answer.

 

I'm planning out a decent TV set up in my bedroom and I'm looking for a micro-PC or set-top box media player that will a) run from my UnRaid without fiddling and b) play damn near anything I throw at it.

 

I've been revving up to roll with a RaspberryPi with XBMC, but I just don't have faith that it will play back a lot of the stuff on my server. H264 is certainly 'the future' but re-encoding a huge bunch of older non HD stuff into it seems like a waste of time, and almost nothing is MPEG2 or VC1 either. So it seems that the Pi just won't play back almost everything I have. And that's just not a whole lot of use for me.

 

So I'm looking for something with more comprehensive codec support that will run off the UnRaid, and ideally that will stream from iPlayer and similar TV streaming sites too. Any thoughts on this would be great. I would rather not have to build an actual HTPC, just on cost grounds, and it would be a lot nicer for me to have just a dinky box that clips onto the TV than an ITX case.

 

Any help here would be really appreciated.

I am a huge xbmc fan, and built several boxes for it.

 

However, sounds like you might like plex

 

You can run Plex media server on your unraid server (as long as it has enough cpu power)

 

and get a roku to stream from the plex media server

 

The interface and library management is not as nice and extensive as xbmc, but you might like it. I only use it for remote streaming on mobile devices

 

roku hd costs less than $50.plex channel on it is free, and so is the plex media server

If you are looking for wide ranging codec support, I would stick with XBMC, but not on a low powered device like the Raspberry Pi - its hardware acceleration is too codec specific and it lacks raw processing power.  I run XBMC (I use the Openelec builds) on an Asus AT5IONT-I mini-ITX platform.  It's very happy even with full bandwidth blu-ray rips, and plays everything else that I throw at it (including all my audio files).  It's relatively compact with quite low power consumption.

If you are looking for wide ranging codec support, I would stick with XBMC, but not on a low powered device like the Raspberry Pi - its hardware acceleration is too codec specific and it lacks raw processing power.  I run XBMC (I use the Openelec builds) on an Asus AT5IONT-I mini-ITX platform.  It's very happy even with full bandwidth blu-ray rips, and plays everything else that I throw at it (including all my audio files).  It's relatively compact with quite low power consumption.

 

The Openelec builds are in fact linux based or not? Can you play BD ISOs and folders or just .m2ts files. I thought BD ISOs or folders were only possible with an external player and Windows based XBMC is needed for that?

 

 

Thanks for the suggestions... I hadn't contemplated an integrated CPU-type set-up and it does seem to shave the costs quite nicely; I had otherwise been thinking of a Trinity or Pentium build.

 

A quick look through my usual suppliers couldn't find me an AT5IONT-I in the UK, but I have seen a few places offering a AMD Hudson based boards, and particularly the Gigabyte GA-E350N seems to offer some strong competition with set-top boxes. Particularly to get the same compatibility as one of my desktops, a few pounds extra to get a full-featured web-browser with the option for keyboards, mice, IR remotes and whatever else I fancy seems to be worth it.

 

Do these kind of motherboards without big noise free passive coolers normally offer the ability to switch the cooler? The ones I've been looking at seem to come with a stock cooler of some kind, but I don't imagine most coolers would support that chipset, but I would like to go fanless if possible.

 

Any other thoughts here would be still be greatly appreciated; I really want to know what my options are. While the integrated CPU plan looks good, the cost is still quite a ways above a good set-top box (mostly from the case and HDD), so I'd like to see what else is out there.

If you are looking for wide ranging codec support, I would stick with XBMC,

 

To be clear, plex will play everything xbmc plays as well. If roku does not support the codec, then the Plex Media server will transcode it into a format that the roku plays. But it's all behind the scenes. The op said he didn't want a m-ITX box and roku is a little hockey puck streamer that can be mounted behind the tv. Plus, the op already has an unraid server, that can run the media server and therefore the roku option would be the cheapest by far at $50 (or 50 pounds). Roku also plays iplayer, netflix, now tv and others.

 

If the op is considering m-ITX as he later suggested, he can look into ecosmartpc.com . They have some barebones builds with either sandy-bridge celeron or llano. I built a llano (A6-3500) with the E-i5 case they have and it is awesome. They play whatever you throw at them with xbmc on them without breaking a sweat. I certainly recommend those over the zacate or the atom/ion systems as the menus are more fluid, and they play netflix in windows. (the guy who runs ecosmartpc.com is very active and extremely friendly and helpful over at xbmc forums)

 

OR. . .

 

another option is a zotac zbox nano (either AD10 or AD11). It is much smaller than m-ITX and is zacate (E-350 and E-450 respectively). With openelec (which is a totally stripped down linux with just xbmc not much else) it works like an appliance and plays everything. However, as I mentioned earlier, it is zacate and the menus aren't as fluid as celeron or llano options. I also heard that due to the small diameter of the cpu fan, and the cramped case, they might be noisier. But they do come with a remote.

Cheers for that dude. That's a very comprehensive run down of whats out there. I'll get to googling and see what comes up.

 

Edit -

 

My Unraid is running off of an old Athlon 64 X2 5000+... Do you think it could handle transcoding on the fly, because honestly my hopes aren't high, and if I have to spend as much cash on upgrading my server as I would spend building a low-price HTPC then that's not really saving me money.

My Unraid is running off of an old Athlon 64 X2 5000+... Do you think it could handle transcoding on the fly, because honestly my hopes aren't high, and if I have to spend as much cash on upgrading my server as I would spend building a low-price HTPC then that's not really saving me money.

I have a an X2 3800+, but that's in my backup server which is only used as a simple file store and that is already quite slow.  For transcoding I would not recommend even the 5000+.  It may be capable, but I suspect you'd be pushing the limits and that will result in problems that may be hard to diagnose.  The downside to updating that of course is new motherboard, CPU and RAM at the minimum.

 

 

I am very happy with my modded Apple TV1 (Added CrystalHD card) running Crystalbuntu. Runs XBMC and plays everything I throw at it. Interface is supersmooth.

My Unraid is running off of an old Athlon 64 X2 5000+... Do you think it could handle transcoding on the fly, because honestly my hopes aren't high, and if I have to spend as much cash on upgrading my server as I would spend building a low-price HTPC then that's not really saving me money.

 

that could be a bit low... but should work for one single transcoding at the time.

you can easily test it out. install plex media server and use the webinterface to play a media file. i think, that the webinterface player also uses the integrated transcoder to play media files. (as long as it can't be played directly, in which case the transcoder is not necessary.) and the webinterface player should support similar codecs as the roku. otherwise, if you have an android or ios device, you could try that to test the transcoder...

I figured I'd give plex a bash, nothing to lose by finding out if my processor can handle transcoding or not. It's currently building my media library. I can't imagine needing/wanting to transcode more than one thing at a time, simply because a potential Roku box would be the only thing in the house that needs it. I have two PCs, that are primarily what stream things and a hacked XBMC original xbox in the living room that plays anything short of H264/MKV just fine, so I can't see the need for plural transcoding, at least not now. If I can afford another nice big TV, then I should be able to afford to upgrade the server.

 

Any idea what kind of stuff is likely to make it need to transcode? Most of my library is in Xvid or DivX (older is DivX, newer is Xvid) but there's a smattering of H264 and sundry random formats too. My concern is that the web player won't need to transcode any of those and I won't find out if it works well until I get a Roku box and then have to vent my rage by throwing the roku through the new TV.

 

While it is somewhat tangential, the people who make Plex seem to be pretty awesome and deserve more exposure.

Ok, so transcoding is working ok. Kinda. Sort of. I'm running it on the top quality profile (1080p@20mbs) and the server seems happy to code that. No stuttering or buffering. The CPU start out at 99%, but drops off to 50% or less inside a minute, then down to 35% a few minutes after that so I'm going to call that as being ok. The temps are reading mid to high 40s, which as I recall should be safe for an Athlon. I'm willing to entertain a new cooler though, since I'm just on stock air atm. What do you guys think?

 

There is some minor quality drop in the transcode, but it genuinely is very minor. Fast motion causes some minor blocking, but really if you aren't the guy that encoded it it would be very hard to tell that it doesn't just look like that. If I sit and watch, I can nitpick all over it (if there's shallow focus ever, the background blocks out some which is fingernails down a blackboard to me!) but it gets my stamp of approval as being watchable. I'm going to get a second opinion before I actually take the jump, because I'm not looking to buy today anyway, so I may as well get a non-video geeks thoughts on it. I can live with the quality its outputting, if normal people think its 'good' then it seems we have a winner.

I use a WD TV Live Streaming Media Player on two TVs and an older model (TV Live Plus) on a third.  No need for Plex or anything else as it supports a fairly large number of media types and containers on its own.  It can play my ISO files, mkv, and my m2t HD camcorder files and a bunch of others that I don't use.  Can be found for around $90 and a bit cheaper when on sale.  Has wireless and wired (I use wired and NFS shares) and has a library function, though not as nice as xbmc.  There are scrapers for it that can create the proper graphics and xml files that turn out real nice.

User created library example pics: Here and Here

 

I'm having some real problems with Plex and transcoding. Everything seems to be awesome and then around 30-35mins in it crashes out. That seems to be an issues a few people have reported on their forums. If I can't solve this relatively easily, then I'm going to have to look for another solution. If it was crashing out after an hour maybe, then fine whatever, mostly I'll be watching TV shows so it wouldn't come up too frequently, but if its going to happen every half hour that thing is in use that's just not good enough. Any thoughts on how/why this is happening then that'd be awesome. As the crash is happening I'm getting this on my UnRaid log, as well as an error in the program:

 

Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel: Pid: 19571, comm: smartctl Not tainted 3.0.31-unRAID #1 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel: Call Trace: (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c105d493>] T.575+0x55/0x15f (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c119d61b>] ? ___ratelimit+0xaf/0xc4 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c105d5cc>] T.574+0x2f/0x108 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c10300b9>] ? has_capability_noaudit+0x18/0x21 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c105d8a2>] out_of_memory+0x1fd/0x283 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c10603b1>] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x3f8/0x47f (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c106cefa>] do_anonymous_page+0x103/0x21c (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c106dc59>] handle_pte_fault+0x83/0x20f (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c106e24c>] handle_mm_fault+0x138/0x14a (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c101b582>] ? mm_fault_error+0x129/0x129 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c101b896>] do_page_fault+0x314/0x332 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c1031ace>] ? update_process_times+0x53/0x58 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c102cda1>] ? irq_exit+0x32/0x53 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c101b582>] ? mm_fault_error+0x129/0x129 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c130f302>] error_code+0x5a/0x60 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel:  [<c101b582>] ? mm_fault_error+0x129/0x129 (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel: Out of memory: Kill process 5240 (Plex Media Serv) score 22 or sacrifice child (Errors)
Jan 17 06:14:39 Tower kernel: Killed process 24285 (Plex Transcoder) total-vm:113884kB, anon-rss:26440kB, file-rss:3628kB (Errors)

 

It seems to be saying its a memory issue, but I've been monitoring the memory useage and it doesn't ever increase, it just fluctuates around and then BAM. Dead. Uncool.

 

Now the WDTV is looking pretty good to me. Naitive Xvid support makes me really happy, even if the channel support isn't so complete. It's still 50 quid cheaper than an ITX-box and only a few quid more than the Roku, and I'm happy to pay that to just have it plug in and work. Which I guess isn't really the UnRaid attitude but there really is only so much energy I can put in to saving 15 pounds.

The WDTV's work quite well - I've got two of them in bedrooms and they pretty much handle anything you throw at them.  I still use Plex with them though - they will pick up DLNA sources just fine, so you get all the nice thumbnails etc as well.

 

With your limited CPU though I wouldn't bother - it'll play everything directly just fine.  I've even thrown a few 15Gb'ish .mkv's at one of them and it doesn't break a sweat.

 

The only other thing I'd double check is that you're on the latest Plex 0.9.7.11 build if you still want to investigate that path.  Plex is definitely a great solution when it works - I've not experienced any of the issues you've mentioned with it, so can't comment further.

It's definitely the latest build, I only installed it today. The thing I'm experiencing seems to be an infrequent but real issue with some plex stuff. It's been reported in the windows build too, so it may well be something on the hardware side. I'm not too upset about it since the WD box will play my stuff natively. There's not a huge amount of DivX in my server, just old stuff from way back when and re-encoding into DivX gave me tolerable quality at about 75mb per episode.

 

I'm not too worried about thumbnails and such to be honest. Pretty is nice to have if its there, but if getting it will make problems then its not a big deal. That said, the issue with Plex is with transcoding, not with playback as a whole, and since the WD box can natively play Xvid, I can turn the transcoding off and still get the benefit of its media library stuff.

 

Of course since I won't be relying on Plex to make things work at all, it's a lot less of a worry. I can try it on the WD, and if it still gives me problems then I can just turn it off and still have my media workings. It was more of a concern when that was going to be the primary way of making the Roku work, but now I can just see and poke a bit and its not critical to anything.

The WDTV's work quite well - I've got two of them in bedrooms and they pretty much handle anything you throw at them.  I still use Plex with them though - they will pick up DLNA sources just fine, so you get all the nice thumbnails etc as well.

 

With your limited CPU though I wouldn't bother - it'll play everything directly just fine.  I've even thrown a few 15Gb'ish .mkv's at one of them and it doesn't break a sweat.

 

The only other thing I'd double check is that you're on the latest Plex 0.9.7.11 build if you still want to investigate that path.  Plex is definitely a great solution when it works - I've not experienced any of the issues you've mentioned with it, so can't comment further.

 

Plex comes in handy for the WD (or really any streaming media box) if you have them on wireless.  Wireless is just plain inadequate for anything of decent bit rate unless your on a very quiet 2.4GHz environment or 5GHz by yourself.  Plex downgrades your video quality so you have less to send out which makes things quick with less buffering.  Being somewhat of a purist, I don't like storing 12+GB BD movie rips then converting them to a lower quality just to watch them (my kids don't care though).  I have a couple wireless computers that the kids like to watch their shows on and if they are by themselves it will play with occasional buffering.  Get another wireless computer using the wireless and the high bit rate stuff buffers constantly so a situation like that plex would come in handy.  I can stream multiple BD rips to wired computers or the WD boxes without issue.  Also of note for the WD boxes, one of the three TVs I have the boxes on is not HD - is a standard 4:3 and the box converts from BD resolution just fine.  The picture is much clearer than playing a DVD quality version.

 

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Unraid 5.0-rc10 - Asus M5A78L-MLX Plus - AMD Athlon II X3 450 Rana 3.2GHz - 8GB DDR3 - Antec NEO ECO 620W - Antec Three Hundred Case - 1x Rosewill RC-211 - Parity: 1T Seagate ST1000DM005/HD103SJ - DATA: 3x WD Black 750G - 1x 1T Seagate ST1000DM003 - 1x 500G Seagate ST500DM002, Cache: Intel X25-V SSD 40GB

I guess its somewhat relative. I was deeply distressed with the quality of video that anything short of max (1080p@20Mbit) gave me. Even things that were way below that quality in the original rip look straight up horrible to me unless they were using the absolute max setting. The max settings looked pretty good, but they don't look to be saving much by way of bandwidth. And of course the transcoding is still crashing very reliably.

 

Personally, I'm not too worried about bandwidth. I guess there's the possibility of me picking things up in 1080p once I have this set-up done (ie a screen worth watching them on) but if it won't stream them wirelessly then I have powerline adapters I'm not using to take a shot with, and failing anything else I possess a 50m spool of cat6 cable. I don't see bandwidth being the limiting factor on any level.

you might look to a small all-in-one PC. I have a couple older Acer Revo IONS that work flawlessly with XBMC.

they are pretty small and be vesa mounted behind the TV.

I have had these things gong for a few years now without a complaint.

I can toss 1080p ISO's at it and it plays them back flawlessly (and of course anything less then that including DTS is fine)

I am sure you can find something equivalent to this that is small and even better..

 

 

The transcoding crash said something about smartctl which is disk related. Is your disk spin down 30min by chance? Change it to 2hrs+ and try transcoding again.