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Internet/network streaming media box... thingies
Ledneh
shinesquawkRegistered User regular
shinesquawkRegistered User regular
I was thinking of picking up something like this Sony SMPN200 media center box... thingy (is there a name for these?) on the way home from work tonight, for my bedroom so I can watch netflix, or hulu, or one of the movies on my home network or whatever while waiting to fall asleep.
Or this one also from Sony which specifically mentions being able to stream off your own network.
Has anyone had any experience with devices like this, or want to recommend any devices in particular or alternatives to this class of device?
SONY SMPN200
3D READY NETBOX, DLNA, NETFLIX + APPS, WIFI,SMART PHONE APP
Mfr: SONY Model: SMPN200
FRYS.com #6897176 UPC: 027242833289
Turn your TV into a smart TV and enjoy wireless access to popular apps like Netflix, HuluPlus, YouTube, Pandora, and Crackle. Stream your favorite movies, TV shows, music and more, even in full HD and 3D. Control it all with a simple smartphone app for iPhone and Android.
Or this one also from Sony which specifically mentions being able to stream off your own network.
Has anyone had any experience with devices like this, or want to recommend any devices in particular or alternatives to this class of device?
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That said, it does its job (Netflix on the TV) quickly and well.
it has some audio quirks with HD audio though.
Anyone have one of those and have any feedback to offer? It's between that and the boxee right now, but I'm leaning toward the revue because that keyboard is neato
What kinds of quirks? Never noticed any myself.
Another cool thing about the Boxee Box is that is supports AirPlay, if you happen to have any iOS devices laying around.
Awesome to be reading through Twitter or RSS on the couch, someone links a video, and I can shoot it right to the TV to watch.
iTunes even detects it so I can pipe music from my office to the living room sound system.
The Boxee has its own pseudo-keyboard on the back of the remote. Also it doesn't seem like Logitech will be doing much in the way of support for the Revue in the future. The Revue does appear to be a DLNA renderer while the Boxee box isn't, if that matters to you.
Personally, I picked up a WD TV Live a week ago; it's a bit cheaper than the other two but has fewer features. It works well for my home network since I organize everything on my server and the box is basically a dumb player for those and Netflix; so far it has handled everything I throw at it short of BD images. The on-screen keyboard is a pain to use at times, I'll admit, but I don't need it that often. It also works as a DLNA renderer, so I've started to use my Android phone as a remote instead (just for music so far; haven't gotten my video DLNA server running yet).
@Durinthal
The limitation with those is it stops at 720p
Satans..... hints.....
Honestly I feel like if I want to get up to Shenanigans® I'd just build a $200 PC and be able to do whatever the fuck I want with it :V
Still, noted, thanks. I wish it was possible to see if a particular player's gonna be able to open all the videos on my network or not--that and a usable keyboard (so Boxee and Revue) are my two biggest wants, with Netflix being decidedly third.
Guess I could always try one this weekend and return it if it doesn't fly
the biggest problem is the problem with all jailbroken iOS devices. You have to shut down the updates, and wait for the jailbreak community to catch up with the game of cat and mouse on your device. And some of the Apple updates put pretty amazing features in there, which makes the jailbreak SOMETIMES feel like a negative more than a positive.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
The Roku 2 HD is the cheaper 720p version. I plan on picking up the next level up (1080p) for my larger tv in the basement.
Sorry, forgot the ref links:
http://www.roku.com/roku-products
http://elan.plexapp.com/2011/05/03/plex-on-the-roku/
I was thinking about getting a Roku. I am basically trying to save money by getting rid of cable TV. I dont download or rip stuff. I dont even watch much TV, this is primarily for the wife. If this thing is on and she's watching it, will it impair any online gaming I may be doing at the time?
How good are the TV show selections.
Building your own HTPC is, to me, the best way to go but you won't do it for $200. Not unless you already have a lot of spare parts to use, and even then not in a small form factor appropriate for your entertainment center (if you intend to keep girlfriends/wives/nongeek roommates happy). I paid $100 just for a case. Granted, that also included a 350W PSU (sufficient for HTPC use) and it has a built-in remote receiver/LCD display. But even if you don't care about that crap you hit a floor...a bare minimum tower case with a PSU that won't set your parts on fire will run you like $50. A mobo will run you like $50. A CPU will run you like $75. Still need a hard drive, RAM, maybe a video card as well (depending what mobo/cpu you got and what kind of content you want to run).
The stuff adds up, I guess is what I'm saying.
Things might have changed, obviously. I haven't priced this out lately. But it wasn't that long ago that I looked into it, and it was really hard to keep it under $300 for a fully functional HTPC without recycling parts.
Thankfully when I did mine I had an extra C2D processor and Radeon 4550 low-profile video card laying around, so I managed to save quite a bit.
It DOES have access to the google market though, so I wonder if it can be beefed up via that, or if I have to find another box that does a better job with network media.
So awesome, in fact, that the Boxee developers are going to stop developing for computers and focus solely on the Boxee Box.
The UI need's some love; it takes way to many button presses to do anything. It crashes, often. And it often has issues reading files from my computer.
I bought it to primarily stream video from my computer, and to stream video from services such as NetFlicks and Hulu. I didn't realize until after I bought it, but Hulu is boycotting Boxee. Being able to stream video from the few video blogs (Extra Credits, etc) that I view would have been a bonus. Unfortunately, it appears that Boxee's primary goal is to find me episodes of TV shows that I don't watch.
I am still playing around with it, and hopefully the UI and stability issues will get fixed, but right now I'm rating it only slightly above my old Hacked TiVo. I'm wondering if a Roku w/ an external HDD would have been a better investment.
I hear good stuff about the Micca brand too.
Once I figured out the paradigm for the UI, it made a lot more sense. I was approaching it thinking in terms of specific files or episodes, but really it does a lot of work to unify shows. You tell it you watch to watch Castle, and it will pull files from your computer, from Net Flicks, and from the Internet to get you as complete a list of episodes as possible. This is a cool thing. But not Hulu, cause Hulu hates Boxee.
Unfortunately it crashed too often, and always needed coaxing to play files from my computer. My attempts to find a solution on the User Support Forums resulted in "It's not the Boxee's fault, rebuild your home network". To use the car analogy of computers... I went looking for an alternate fuel car, and Boxee tried to sell me an AT-ST; all I need to do is replace all of the roads with walker paths.
I have an old Hacked TiVo that I'm comparing Boxee too. While the Hacked TiVo doesn't stream from the Internet, or play Pandora, or unify episodes into shows, or any of the slick cool things that Boxee does... it does work. It reads files from my computer and it doesn't crash. So I'm rating Boxee Box at 0.75 Hacked TiVos.
Boxee is awesome and has lots of potential. It might work great for your set up; but it didn't work for mine. I'm not sure what my next step is, but I'm looking at the WDTV and the Micca brand of Media Players. Or I'll just have to admit that I'm only doing this to avoid building a HTPC and just build it myself.
I've been looking at the Boxee Box for a while now, and I've been pretty tempted by it. However, Googling around this afternoon has led me to believe that Boxees are temperamental, have poor support, etc.
What I'm looking for is some kind of box that can do all or most of the following:
- Netflix
- playback of files on a hard drive (my stuff right now is mostly ALAC/MP3 audio and M4V/MP4 videos)
- 720p, HDMI (I guess better than this would be nice but I don't see myself buying a new TV anytime soon (I have a 32" Vizio))
DVD playback would be nice, Blu-Ray playback would be killer (I know that there are Popcorn Hour devices that let you slide in a Bluray drive of your own, I've been trying to figure out if there's anything out there that supports this right out of the box...I've been thinking about making the switch to Blu-Ray for a while now)
RIght now the impression that I'm getting is that maybe I should be looking at the Boxee box and a separate Blu-ray player.
I want the same things you do, but finding the combination of the first two is killer. I decided upon building a computer explicitly for running XBMC. So far it's cost me about $450, including a Windows license. But it'll do everything you want, and the support is phenomenal.
Edit: Disclaimer; currently it is working on Ubuntu as I was trying to avoid buying the Windows license. But it looks like you need Windows for NetFlix. I'll be setting it up with windows next week.
Don't do it. You'll be better off spending $70 on a Netflix-ready Blu-Ray player than on a Windows license. Netflix on Windows is...good, I guess, but when you get into the HTPC realm I find you too often run into frame rate issues (blowing up to 1080p on a weak video card), frame sync issues (actually a problem with a lot of things, though XBMC seems to handle it well), and it's just generally not a couch-friendly interface.
I guess what I'm saying is that if Netflix is the reason you're buying Windows, don't. If XBMC is working in Linux, and doing what you need it to, stay there. I still needed Windows, because I'm using a CableCard tuner and from my understanding those aren't really supported on Linux. Then again, they're barely supported on Windows.
Though, to be honest, it might work fine. I know my Samsung TV hasn't had any real problems streaming from my network shares, it seemed to handle 95% of the files I threw at it when I used it.
The move to Windows is more about being able to use the computer for more than just XBMC (torrent, Artemis, what ever strikes my fancy). Basically, if I want to fiddle with something, I want to fiddle with it in an OS I'm comfortable with using tools I'm familiar with. Netflix is a very nice bonus as I've already got it on the Wii.
If XBMC on Windows turns out to be problematic, then I'll let ya'll know and go back to Ubuntu.
Biggest problem I've had with my HTPC, really, is frame sync issues when playing online content (HBO Go, Netflix, what have you). The frame rate is fine, the video card isn't struggling, it just can't seem to sync the damn thing to the TV, so I get periodic microstutters from "skipped" frames due to syncing. It's annoying as hell. XBMC has zero problem here (same with MPC-HC), it syncs up just fine. Well, except for a brief stint when I was running HDMI to the receiver, rather than the TV, and XBMC seemed to always want to go to a 50Hz video mode (for 24fps content, 30fps content, for just about everything). Hooking back up to the TV fixed that, though. Didn't care to dig further into the issue, since I had other issues that it was causing as well with audio.
So, like I said, now I just use the HTPC for XBMC and Windows Media Center (where it acts as my cable box/DVR), and use the Blu-Ray player for most all the online shit. Though I guess I might wind up using the Xbox for HBO Go once that goes live in April.