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School me on options for a HD Media centre solution
LewieP
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
OK, so my parents have decided to get a new TV, a cool HD set.
I'm pretty set for picking out a TV for them, but they also want something for watching stuff on.
So, I have no idea what to suggest. The TV set will be a 1080p one, and I don't know what kind of thing would fit these criteria (in order of importance):
Other than that, a PS3 jumps to mind. Rip out the hard drive and stick in a bigger one, get playTV, grab a remote and hook it up via HDMI. Any feedback on how the PS3 works as a media centre? what about playTV? How can you stream or transfer files from a PC to a PS3. Any other features of the PS3 I've not thought of that make it good for in the living room? How is the upscaling?
I am open to any ideas really.
I'm pretty set for picking out a TV for them, but they also want something for watching stuff on.
So, I have no idea what to suggest. The TV set will be a 1080p one, and I don't know what kind of thing would fit these criteria (in order of importance):
- Be really easy to use, I am no around most of the time, and if they can't operate it (and they are by no means technologically skilled).
- Output in HD, 1080p would be preferable.
- Play digital video files from a computer. Either streaming, or by transferring to an internet hard drive. Preferably with compatibility with a wide range of files. Upscaling would be great too.
- Allow them to record TV broadcasts. Even better if it can be integrated to an EPG so they can just "record series", I don't know if this exists or not, but would be great.
- Playback of disc media. Definitely DVD, but blu-ray would be good too. Upscaling DVD would be great too.
- All in one box. They don't want several units, just one box.
Other than that, a PS3 jumps to mind. Rip out the hard drive and stick in a bigger one, get playTV, grab a remote and hook it up via HDMI. Any feedback on how the PS3 works as a media centre? what about playTV? How can you stream or transfer files from a PC to a PS3. Any other features of the PS3 I've not thought of that make it good for in the living room? How is the upscaling?
I am open to any ideas really.
LewieP on
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My understanding is that there is no way whatsoever to get a 360 to record TV, is this correct?
Does a decent DVR/Blu ray player exist?
If you're willing to put some work into the setup, a PC with a BD-ROM, Hauppauge tuner, and MythTV (or a variation) will do everything you want (and more). You can set up a remote to control everything and it's pretty user friendly. It will take some learning to get working in the first place, though (it's linux only). There are Windows HTPC/PVR programs too but I've never looked into them so I can't recommend one for you, you'd have to check them out yourself.
To quote my mum "I don't want a computer in the front room", and XBMC doesn't support any HD video, and recording live stuff is important.
If streaming isn't that great for PS3, what about transferring files? Can you just stick videos in a shared directory and transfer them across?
As for not wanting a computer int he room, the Mini is smaller than Dreamcast. It's almost invisible.
Ooh.
Does a mac mini "do HD"?
XBMC absolutely supports HD stuff, just not if you run it on an Xbox. I play 1080p videos on my XBMC all the time. Also, you can get media center cases for a HTPC that your parents will never know are a computer unless you tell them (for examples, look at http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=690&name=HTPC-Media-Center-Cases). My HTPC has no keyboard or mouse, just a case hooked to the TV and a remote to control it.
PS3 has absolutely no file sharing capabilities. The only way to copy files to your PS3 is physically move them over USB, or stream them. Regardless whether you stream them or copy them over, though, it still won't play anything but divx/xvid/mp4.
A mac mini doesn't have the processing power to play HD stuff, no.
You can do all sorts of complicated stuff, but with the harmony, a single button press will get it set up to do what they want. And if something gets jacked up, it has a HELP button. I would say look for a media center pc or the like and then use a harmony remote to do the complicated input/selection switching for each activity. Make it as simple as possible. I do not recommend a PS3 for this simply because a PS3 uses a bluetooth remote control and my harmony, or most other universal remotes, only do IR. You can purchase a 3rd party IR adapter for the PS3, but, in my experience, 3rd party extenders like that have quite a few glaring limitations.
tldr: best first step is buy a harmony remote.
I only gave XBMC a try recently, but it's pretty damn cool.
HD video seems to work fine, although I only have 720p stuff to test with and not 1080p. (But then, I don't exactly have a 1080p set, either).
And I need to buy a remote of course.
I don't have any idea on specs at the moment but when I get home from work perhaps I'll post them and you guys can tell me what my most cost-effective route for setting it up is.
Ideally I'd love to rip all my DVDs to the hard drive and be able to view them from a remote-controlled menu ala Apple TV.
Switch: 6200-8149-0919 / Wii U: maximumzero / 3DS: 0860-3352-3335 / eBay Shop
XBMC.
Dell Dimension 4500S
Without booting it up, I'm fairly certain it's a 1.8Ghz P4, 768MB of RAM, and a 40GB HDD.
Is it worth putting the money into or would I be wasting my time?
Switch: 6200-8149-0919 / Wii U: maximumzero / 3DS: 0860-3352-3335 / eBay Shop
I'll likely pick up a 512MB PCI card and see if that helps.
Switch: 6200-8149-0919 / Wii U: maximumzero / 3DS: 0860-3352-3335 / eBay Shop
Well it's made to run smoothly on an original xbox, so a 733mHz CPU with 64 megs of RAM oughta do it ;-P
What do you mean by sluggish? Like when you press a key it takes a while to react, or the animations move slowly, or what? It's easy to install, so try it on your main/gaming PC and see if that's just how it feels. Navigation with a mouse always feels kinda weird in XBMC because it's made for a controller/remote.
For the record it's an Athlon X2 4600, 3gb of PC3200 ram with an 8600gt. I boot Vista Home Premium off a dissected Western Digital Passport drive that had the USB->SATA dongle die, and use a 500gb SATA drive to store TV / downloads on. For actual media an LG blu-ray / HD-DVD drive cost me about £60 whilst a dual-tuner DVB card cost me about £40. You can spend anything from £20 to £70 on USB remote, it just depends on what features you want. Mine is pretty basic but it's got hotkeys for TV, DVD, recorded TV, and the EPG so that's all we really need. I also spent about £5 on a DVI->HDMI cable which allows me to get the 1080p picture out as the VGA input on my TV is a bit shit.
You could spend some money on a Silverstone media centre case so it doesn't look out of place in a living room, but I've just got an old case which is shoved down the side of our TV stand and out of the way.
Windows Media Centre is pretty much perfect once you get some codecs installed so it can play back most AVIs, etc, and I think if my fiancee can figure out how to use it after a few days of just randomly mashing buttons anyone can. It has a "record series" option which you can do either from the EPG or just when you're watching something, and it'll buffer basically as much TV as it has space for so you can always rewind live TV and pause for huge amounts of time.
It's also pretty neat to have nothing good on TV, browse to your recorded programs and suddenly find out that your computer has happily recorded a few episodes of Red Dwarf for you whilst you slept.
x264 is not a format, it's a free Library of the H.264 format only not as good. Of all these variations the PS3 at this point in time only plays the ISO H.264 standard (Mpeg4 part 14 I think) that's commonly known as "AVC."
The PS3 actually works very well for streaming, you just have to use the correct streaming program. Anything that's UPNP will work and then it depends on supported formats. I just use Nero Media Home at this point.
All I know is the PS3 will play exactly 0 of my HD mkv x264 files unless I transcode or remux them. To me this makes it quite a poor media center compared to the variety of HTPC options which will stream anything.
Honestly, try not to use wireless for streaming high-def video, or for that matter any video or music. It really sucks to have the movie get choppy because the microwave is on, or what have you. Wires are nice and reliable.
Ok, there are 2 reasons for this. First it's the container .mkv, PS3 does not recognize this container. Matroska development has pretty much stopped anyway but that's another issues. Second, it's that x264 again that also has issues. It's a FOSS H.264 library that has some issues when being played back by some devices (PS3) for not being any of the official H.264 standards.
A decent amount of this has to do with licensing issues in regards to the software used for playback. Many of the options in this thread are completely open source while the PS3's OS is closed source so it can't use them.
I'm excessively nitpicking here but you mean read the file. Any file can be streamed to the PS3, the issues is with the PS3 reading them as a Media Extender. The Popcorn Hour is an Media Extender example done right.
Ok, I'm done here. We'll just wind up quibbling over minor details at this point.
It may be a bit redundant to have both under the TV, but the Mini looks nice and isn't too expensive.
You could use pretty much any PC to stream your content via UPnP to the PS3, yes. As mentioned above, though, any HD file you download from the internet will NOT stream to the PS3 without at least remuxing it first (google mkv2vob). IMO if you're just going to stream stuff to the PS3 you might as well use your main/gaming PC. Chances are it's got room for more HDDs, is already hooked to your home network, and doesn't cost you anything :0)
I've heard good things about TVersity for streaming UPnP, but when I tried it it would frequently crash. When it was up it seemed to work fine though, except that you have to rescan your media every time you add a new file (I think that's just a UPnP thing though).
However it's a little rough around the edges right now. A few things to watch out for:
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showpost.php?p=7214026&postcount=10
It's really quite pretty with skins made specifically for 720/1080p.
Generally though, I've found that parents,girlfriends,flatmates etc dont want the hassle of something like that - so I would recommend one of these bad boys.
Logitech Harmony 1000.
You set it up once via a pc interface, then you have one button for TV and it switches on all the compponents you need. Want DVD? one button turns it on, switches your TV/amp over and turns off anything else not needed.
That way you can have as big a media setup as you like but the interface is really simple for others.
5.1 AC3 beta drivers are out. Initial reports are that they work just fine.
I've also figured out how to get the .ts files into Vegas to edit.
Once a stable public beta of BeyondTV 4.9 comes out (and the Core i7s are released), I'll begin the next phase of my plan to make an HD FutureWeapons montage.
So how do I go about turning dvds of movies and tv shows into individual video files? I tried to search for some h.264 converters last night, but it became obvious I don't know what I'm doing at all
Alternately you can probably just get VirtualDubMod, open up the .vob and encode it right there if you know how to use it.
Honestly if you broadcast in the 2.4Ghz band then there is a strong chance a microwave could cause interference, but in the 5Ghz it's pretty solid.