October 21, 200916 yr I'm trying to find one that fits my needs. I have a PCH C200 on pre-order but I'm not sure if there is something better for cheaper. I've looked into the WD TV Live but I have yet to see of anyone getting it to work with an unraid setup. What are my other options? I basically want to be able to play HD/BluRay movies(m2ts/mkv) files over the network and not have them stutter. I was using Plex on my macbook but some files would never play so I'm guessing it's not powerful enough to play HD content.
October 21, 200916 yr I'm trying to find one that fits my needs. I have a PCH C200 on pre-order but I'm not sure if there is something better for cheaper. I've looked into the WD TV Live but I have yet to see of anyone getting it to work with an unraid setup. What are my other options? I basically want to be able to play HD/BluRay movies(m2ts/mkv) files over the network and not have them stutter. I was using Plex on my macbook but some files would never play so I'm guessing it's not powerful enough to play HD content. Previously media portal running on a full blown HTPC. Powerful enough to decode high bitrate HD in software. Now £200 Asrock ION 330 running XBMC (similar to plex) with HD content off loaded to the Nvidia card using VDPAU. Good enough to run blu ray mkv's (original blu ray stream in an mkv container *no* downsampling or reencoding), cheap and uses very little power.
October 21, 200916 yr I'm trying to find one that fits my needs. I have a PCH C200 on pre-order but I'm not sure if there is something better for cheaper. I've looked into the WD TV Live but I have yet to see of anyone getting it to work with an unraid setup. What are my other options? I basically want to be able to play HD/BluRay movies(m2ts/mkv) files over the network and not have them stutter. I was using Plex on my macbook but some files would never play so I'm guessing it's not powerful enough to play HD content. why a full blown C200 then? an A-110 would do just that for $100 less (and take up less space), plus you get it right away. A C200 gets you the ability to play unaltered blurays and a fast processor for a better interface, but the product isn't really developed. The C200 will be a work in progress for a while, just like the A100 was for a while. My A100 plays everything I throw at it, except the killa sample, which isn't indicative of real world encodes.
October 21, 200916 yr Macmini. I haven't had any problems playing 1080p blu-ray rips (x264). I use Plex.
October 21, 200916 yr Right now it is an orginal xbox that has been modded and is running XBMC. This works well for my setup as I do not have much HD content as of yet. When the time comes I will probably end up going with a very small computer I build myself or with a Mac mini and run XBMC on it.
October 21, 200916 yr HTPC with MediaPortal (and other stuff depending what I want to do )... ...not with unRAID for now though (using other solution), but that doesn't change anything on what you ask.
October 21, 200916 yr XBMC Live on a $250 Zotac GF9300/E3200/2GB/Apex MI-100 setup. The gpu decoding worked better than the e7400 did @ 3.2ghz so I downgraded to the new 45nm dual core Celeron.
October 22, 200916 yr Author I canceled my C200 order and ordered an A110 instead. Saved $100 and from the reviews it seems it will play everything I want it to. :-)
October 22, 200916 yr Just to chime in. Been using unRaid for awhile and picked up a WD TV Live and stream all my video content from the NAS to it. Works like a charm and they're 129$CDN right now.
October 22, 200916 yr Desktop computer hooked up to TV via HDMI. I would call it an HTPC, but I also use it to browse the net, download torrents, play the occasional game, etc. I don't use any media center software right now, just play the files directly with MPC (media player classic). I may start using XBMC soon, though, because the interface looks very slick. Edit: Just installed XBMC - it is so sexy, and so easy to set up. I'm very happy with it. My only gripe is that it doesn't allow me to customize the buttons on my MCE remote....oh well, at least it works with it. I think I also need to tweak the video settings a bit, since I notice some tearing on panning shots that I don't see when I play the same files via MPC.
October 23, 200916 yr I run my beloved J. River Media Center. Amazing program for organising your media data. Works very well with unRaid too.
October 23, 200916 yr Mac Mini's with plex. One is newish and one is a couple of years old, Neither have any problems playing 1080p. (The newish one over wireless n ) Expensive option but they are small, look nice in the living room and I have the option of using them for other stuff. When I bought the first one I looked at building my own HTPC and found that most of the cases were ugly and I needed to have a bevvy of usb dongles to get bluetooth, infrared and wireless. By the time I had a nice case and had bought all of the additional hardware needed it wasn't much cheaper than a mac mini which has everything built in and comes with a nice remote.
October 30, 200916 yr Edit: Just installed XBMC - it is so sexy, and so easy to set up. I'm very happy with it. My only gripe is that it doesn't allow me to customize the buttons on my MCE remote... You may want to look into EventGhost. Paired my with Harmony remote (functioning as MCE remote) it's a beautiful thing. Full customization of any button. There's a pretty good walkthrough on the XBMC forums http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=38579. If you run into any snags feel free to PM me. I've become pretty good at tweaking the setup for my liking.
October 30, 200916 yr I forgot to post that I use a variant of the following skin with XBMC. http://www.aeonproject.com/gallery.html
October 30, 200916 yr Edit: Just installed XBMC - it is so sexy, and so easy to set up. I'm very happy with it. My only gripe is that it doesn't allow me to customize the buttons on my MCE remote... You may want to look into EventGhost. Paired my with Harmony remote (functioning as MCE remote) it's a beautiful thing. Full customization of any button. There's a pretty good walkthrough on the XBMC forums http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=38579. If you run into any snags feel free to PM me. I've become pretty good at tweaking the setup for my liking. I''ll check that out, thank you very much!
October 31, 200916 yr Thought you guys might like this link, ~200.00 for an atom / ion box that runs xbmc and plays back 1080P. Seems like a good deal to me. http://lifehacker.com/5391308/build-a-silent-standalone-xbmc-media-center-on-the-cheap Nice, thanks for posting!
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