Question For Those That Use UnRaid To Store Their Media/Entertainment Files


helpermonkey

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How does AV over IP fit into this equation, specifically products like Crestron and Just Add Power?

 

It seems like many people are buying a shield ~ $200 for each TV.

 

Is it possible to truly use Unraid as the one/main PC and display to every TV/monitor in the house without the need for buying a separate device for each TV?

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On 2/12/2018 at 2:44 PM, surfshack66 said:

How does AV over IP fit into this equation, specifically products like Crestron and Just Add Power?

 

It seems like many people are buying a shield ~ $200 for each TV.

 

Is it possible to truly use Unraid as the one/main PC and display to every TV/monitor in the house without the need for buying a separate device for each TV?

Products like Just Add Power and other video Matrix switches form the heart of centralized video distribution.  The folks that have these swear by these but they can be pretty expensive if you have a lot of TVs - think $5-10k or more.  Just Add Power is on the cheaper end but if you want 4K it gets more expensive.  And pretty much all of these systems need a dedicated Ethernet run from your central rack to each room where you are distributing power.  Then you may want a HA system like Crestron or Control4 to control it all.  And then you may also want to think about centralized Audio distribution with ceiling speakers, matrix amp, etc.

 

If you still want centralized video an alternative to consider is Video Storm Net Play.  It uses AndroidTV devices like FireTVs or ShieldTVs at each TV as a receiving device.  But you can put almost anything into it using their Encoders.  This also works well for stuff like Video Tiling/PIP or Video Walls.  Depending on what you want to do you could probably get away with spending $2--3k.

 

But then the logical question is:  If I am putting a device like an Nvidia Shield at every TV then why can't I use that as my source for everything?  The thing that may be hardest to replace right now is cable TV and a centralized system like this can help you reduce the number of cable STBs that you rent.

 

For your last question - that is possible but then you may need lots of HDMI cabling through your house.  You may also need a way to get IR or USB connections over the wiring.  You may also need to run several VMs and have multiple video cards.  There are threads here on people who have done systems like this.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
So you mean this sucker http://khadas.com/? - never heard of it - looks pretty awesome - where did you learn about it? I also have a FLIRC on my HTPC and use it with my harmony - is that necessary on this new device without flirc? Is there any reason to think that this produces better quality audio than say - a top of the line roku? I would be totally fine with a box that boots into PLEX - i'm guessing that's an option here? It also seems like it doesn't support 7.1 :-(
 


While you are considering Khadas, just want to point out to everyone that it supports HDMI CEC. This means using your TV remote, you can control kodi even without Infrared. Don't know if Plex supports it though.

I have used Plex plugin inside Kodi, and it still works.


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On 10/13/2017 at 6:26 PM, wayner said:

The Shield is a great option but the Xiaomi MiBox3, which one person mentioned in this thread, is also a very good option.  It is an Android TV box, just like the Shield, but it doesn't have quite as much horsepower.  But it only costs $69.

 

A word of warning on the mibox3 - one of the reasons it is so cheap is because it only has 8GB of storage, which works out to around 5GB of usable space...this has become the bane of my life as I've switched to a richer kodi skin (Estuary Mod V2) and the thumbnail database is too big for the mibox.  I have 2 profiles on my kodi (adults, kids) - for the adults profile I have to store about 50% of the thumbs on a network share as there's no space and 100% of the kids thumbs - and that's with only having bombsquad installed on the internal drive and everything else on the SD.  This leads to a noticeable slowdown in the UI.

 

I've tried storing on a USB drive, but this is hard to crack on the mibox and even if I were successful, the mibox is only USB2.0 - again why the cost is so low.

 

I'm looking at an nvidia or khadas as my upgrade.  I agree the nvidia does look pricey, but support for google assistant and chromecast both of which I need helps justify the extra cost over the Khadas, which might come with a bigger 'support' overhead in terms of getting it all working properly.

Edited by DZMM
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I just received the Khadas Vim2 earlier this week. I boot the VIM2 into Libreelec from an external SD.

 

From reading the Libreelec support forums, I settled on the VIM2 because of known issues with Intel NUCs and shields. Also, for the price point its hard to beat.

 

I run Plex on unraid and use plexkodiconnect on kodi to sync everything. So far its working great. Also, I use HDMI cec so my TV remote works. I bought Flirc thinking I would need it but its nice that VIM2 supports CEC.

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2 hours ago, surfshack66 said:

I just received the Khadas Vim2 earlier this week. I boot the VIM2 into Libreelec from an external SD.

 

I'm curioius - what are the advantages of Librelec over just installing kodi?  I'm not that familiar with Libreelec

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8 minutes ago, DZMM said:

I'm curioius - what are the advantages of Librelec over just installing kodi?  I'm not that familiar with Libreelec

 

Many advantages from what I've researched.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=252916

 

Essentially, once I determined I would use Kodi for media playback on LAN (instead of Plex) I started researching the best hardware for Kodi - which led me to the link posted above.

 

Quote

Known issues across various platforms:

 

 

This next quote is what prompted me to use Libreelec

Quote

Newer AMLogic Android Nougat 7.1.1 Boxes have some important bug fixes in Android Firmware.
AML S905/S905X/S912 boxes however, do make excellent 4K LibreELEC Kodi Krypton devices.

 

Edited by surfshack66
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6 hours ago, DZMM said:

 

A word of warning on the mibox3 - one of the reasons it is so cheap is because it only has 8GB of storage, which works out to around 5GB of usable space...this has become the bane of my life as I've switched to a richer kodi skin (Estuary Mod V2) and the thumbnail database is too big for the mibox.  I have 2 profiles on my kodi (adults, kids) - for the adults profile I have to store about 50% of the thumbs on a network share as there's no space and 100% of the kids thumbs - and that's with only having bombsquad installed on the internal drive and everything else on the SD.  This leads to a noticeable slowdown in the UI.

I believe that this is due to the fact that Kodi/XBMC was not originally intended as a client-server architecture.  Plex, SageTV and others were designed with a client-server implementation with very light demands placed on the client.  IMHO this is a shortcoming of Kodi.

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  • 2 years later...
On 9/27/2017 at 9:50 PM, BobPhoenix said:

I use my HD300 SageTV extenders for my playback.  Won't do 4K but handles everything else well.  Since I have no 4K media not a problem for me.  Will not do netflix/amazon prime but I have PlayOn to record from either to MP4 which will play on HD300.

Got a question...  Are you using a VM for PlayON and if you are, how did you manage to get PlayOn to record without stuttering?  I isolated and assigned 4 out of my 8 cores to the VM I am using but I am still having stuttering issues (not experienced when used on a non-virtualized machine.)  I even tried saving on a network share, on the local drive which resides on the cache drive (ssd) and still it's having stuttering issues, seems to be while storing, because they play just fine.  Is there any way to change the default browser PlayOn uses to use Chrome instead of IE?  I asked them this question and they haven't answered me yet.

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