Ask HN: What is your home media PC setup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your home media PC setup?

29 pointsjoshwcomeau46 comments

I currently watch all media (TV shows, movies) through a MacBook connected via HDMI to a TV, but I'm looking to invest in a better setup.

I'm thinking of buying a mini PC and connecting it to some sort of network storage. Then, I could download content to this network drive on other home computers. I'd imagine I'd use XBMC, unless something better has come along in the last few years?

Curious to hear how others have solved this problem, and how it's working for you.

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You can give Plex a try if you have a number of lightweight clients you'd like to consume your media through. There's several competing media servers with different priorities but Plex is rather dominant nowadays if you don't mind spending a little money for some conveniences.

I've used Plex in a VM and a ZFS based NAS for nearly 4 years now and have had relatively few problems. I've used Android, iOS, Windows, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and MacOS clients all with decently usable results. The hardest thing to deal with in Plex is mostly about sizing your server for the amount of transcoded streams you'll need. With Kodi, this concern is mostly relegated to the client. While mobile computing capabilities have gotten greater the fundamental problem I ran into for years was that no one device will play everything correctly besides a PC. As such, a transcoding server from a PC (even though Plex has several server options including nVidia Shield and some NAS devices) makes the most sense for compatibility across all random media files you could obtain online. Otherwise, your network transfer speed matters still just like with Kodi and a lot of people's wireless setups are just really bad that get glossed over when using streaming native media like from Amazon and Netflix.

I tried to have a good and not expensive approach on that. So in my opinion i have a quite conservative setting.

I have a raspberry pi 3 with osmc installed via noobs at startup. Additionally I bought a DVB-S USB Stick (http://sundtek.com/shop/Digital-TV-Sticks/Sundtek-SkyTV-Ulti...) for germany. A standard TV is connected via HDMI. I use a KODI android app as a remote control.

Additionally I have bought 1 TB NAS on ebay in the cellar which is connected via network cable to the wifi router.

Without TV I had total cost of approximately 300 €

I have connected all music services (soundcloud, etc), all mediathek services of german and austria television providers. Also youtube and vimeo. Everything works great and was extremely low cost, i would say.

I have a similar setup, Rpi3 with OSMC / Kodi installed.

I turned an old 500GB laptop drive into an external HD for storage, with reuse of parts I'd say the whole thing cost me €50/€60 - for the Rpi3, Case, PSU (though most micro USB phone chargers will work so don't buy one unless you need one), Micro SDHC card, and SATA to USB cable for the hard drive (I milled out an old Gameboy and stuck it in there for a retro look)

Advantages: Cheap, no remote required (TV remote can control it through HDMI, or you can use an app), low power, handles 1080p content just fine

Disadvantages: There's currently no way (that I know of) to get Netflix working on Rpi3 hardware. Netflix has no native linux app, and the only browsers it works through are Chrome and Firefox, which are not available on Raspbian or any other Rpi distro. (I would love to be wrong about this. If its possible, somebody please educate me)

Yes this is something i found out recently, that the remote control works over hdmi. This quite astonished me! Also it works out of the box with osmc...

Chromium (open source chrome) definitely works. However if you installed osmc you have propably the openelec distro. I am not sure if you can run a browser on it...

I had to change some keybindings to map the "back" button on my remote, but it largely worked for me out of the box

My setup is based on Roku devices connected to a Freenas server with 12x 3Tb HDD on a RaidZ2 setup to store all the media which is then served through Plex Media Server. It works very well and I've had no problems with this setup aside from a hard drive dying on me every once in a while.

Plex also has an option to use Google Drive or Dropbox and others as a storage medium through their new (although only for the premium Plex Pass holders) Plex Cloud (it's also possible to roll your own though, i've written about it here: https://nunosouto.com/blog/how-to-install-plex-cloud)

I have an Intel NUC set up with Kodi (formerly XBMC) on linux. Able to connect to remote samba shares for serving media, kodi has plenty of extensions and features so you can use it with youtube, radio streams, weather, photos, etc. when not watching video. Also the NUC I have has an IR receiver so a normal tv remote can be used to control kodi (big plus).

Another thing that's nice about setting up a full computer over an android based media device is that you have a fairly decent computer directly connected to the tv to use when/if you have to.

> Another thing that's nice about setting up a full computer over an android based media device is that you have a fairly decent computer directly connected to the tv to use when/if you have to.

Exactly. This is the reason I went for Intel NUC as well. I don't always use PC but when I do, one is always available.

Cool, thanks for reminding me of the Intel NUC. Seems like exactly what I want.

I just have a windows 10 machine plugged into the TV. I have a server farm upstairs with plenty of storage for archives of TV shows if I want them, but these days I can get pretty much anything I want from one of the streaming services online.

I also have a glass table between the couch and the TV, so a dark field mouse is required if I'm doing anything that needs a real mouse. For everything else I just use a wireless keyboard/trackpad combo from Logitech.

You could check out the Remote Control Collection app. It will allow you to use your phone for controlling the mouse, keyboard and media players.

Synology 1513+ running Plex Server and a FireTV Box stuck to every TV in the house. All of my media is stored on the Synology (5x 4TB drives).

I also have one of the less used PCs in the house running Plex Server, and we connect to that for viewing Plex Channels (basically, plugins that front-end NBC.com, ABC.com, and a bunch of other services) to take some of the transcoding load off the Synology.

I have a lifetime subscription to Plex.tv and LOVE the service. The only thing I'd like to improve about my set up is the processor in the Synology, which is too slow to transcode on the fly so I have to target my encodes to my current hardware and rerip when my clients get more capable.

+1 for Synology. I've got the DS214play which is the entry-level version that supports transcoding [1]. It doubles as a backup to all my photos [2][3][4].

[1] https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS216play

[2] https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...

[3] https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal...

[4] https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...

Raspberry PI 3 plus LibreElec. Cheap, consumes a lot less than a PC and plays everything I can throw at it. I would definitely use different boards for non video related tasks, but in this context the RPi still is the one to go for non trivial reasons such as full CEC support and video acceleration.

The home NAS is a MiniITX board with multiple SATA ports and NAS4Free.

Mini PC: http://www.gearbest.com/tv-box-mini-pc/pp_376410.html (not especially fast but it will just about do 4k)

I have a slightly different requirement: I want to

a) watch and record broadcast TV

b) watch youtube/iplayer/amazon

c) watch other random TV and streaming websites (Eurovision selection shows, my wife is a huge fan)

This leads to Windows, and the best solution for recording TV there actually seems to be Windows Media Centre ("ehome"). Unfortunately this is 7 only, so I'm going to try installing a version that's been hacked by the community to run on Win10.

Most of the HTPC software seems to have PVR as an afterthought, where it's either very hard to set up or unreliable. I never want to see tvheadend's web interface again.

Shield TV. Hands down the best steamer you can get. And on top of the streaming benefits, the game stream function is legitimately good. Input lag was not really noticable, even when playing something like rocket league. When I bought it, I went from three devices (Kodi box, Chromecast, Fire TV) to one.

It used to be a 5m HDMI cable from my workstation to my TV with super+p bound to output all to HDMI. Worked reasonably well but became cumbersome when I wanted to use my PC whilst playing media. Currently, I have a tiny Linux box running in my media unit with a Plex client and a Plex server running on my NAS to store everything. Everything is now controlled from a Bluetooth remote for the interface so it's generally pretty resilient. So far the only issue has been transcoding and playing back >1080p media, struggles a bit to keep up, but I suspect the atom in the NAS is as much to blame as the Linux box. Kodi/XBMC could work well in this case as a client as long as sharing was properly configured from Plex server.

I've had a variety of XBMC, Plex, Windows Media Center (hacked to run on Windows 10 and with a variety of mods), various multichannel TV tuners, cable card readers, DLNA devices, dinovo mini keyboards, reprogrammable remotes, etc.

I currently use an Amazon Fire TV, as fighting an endless war with content creators to steal their content is a waste of my time (I also really like the voice search on the Fire devices).

I pay for films, and most TV, but steal Game of Thrones since, bizarrely, it's not available in full HD via Sky's app. In that case, I play it via DLNA.

RPi w/RetroPi, which also integrates Kodi, and a 4TB USB-powered hard drive. Also two 8bitdo SNES style controllers for gaming and controlling Kodi. They are wonderful.

I only recently added Kodi to RPi and it's really nice. I used to have two 2GB MyBook drives with external power and they were very bulky. I would hook them up to my Bluray player with it's massively shitty interface. The new drive is maybe a quarter the size of one of them and Kodi is beyond simple to use.

Plex server on an old i3 laptop with a broken screen and some external USB disks.

Plays in the Plex app or browser on everyone's devices, AppleTV, Fire TV Stick, Vizio TV, etc.

Pretty simple: XBMC/Kodi on Amazon FireTV, connected to Samba share running on my NAS (Ubuntu with ZFS running on HP Microserver). Kodi pretty much plays anything.

I have almost the same setup, one difference being that I have Synology DS215j NAS. I've transited recently from NoName Android box (had it for over 2 years) to newest Amazon FireStick. There is one huge draw back of that. I can not use Amazon Firestick when there is no internet connection. So forget about searching for movie in your library when there is no internet.

All my flat panel TVs have Roku 3 boxes (I don't see the need for 4K video since most of my content isn't 4K). I took a 2010 15" MacBook running 3 versions of OSX behind Seira and that runs Plex Media Server. This setup gives us easy access to Netflix, Amazon Prime as well as local content sourced from DVDs we own. Plex also lets us share videos created from our phones as well but that's probably its weakest feature.

Another poster commented on network issues and he's definitely correct. In terms of our network, I'm running an access point from our fiber provider connected to an Eero wifi range extender coupled to a Circle network filter. All of our Roku boxes are connected to wifi except for 1 which is hard wired. The Eero boxes span 3 floors and performance is (finally) pretty good.

HP Microserver Gen8 with:

> Debian 8

> Xeon E3-1260L

> 12 GB RAM

> 120GB SSD (OS), 2 x 3TB WD RED (Data), 2 x 4TB HGST (Movies/TV Shows)

> Plex (Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos)

> CouchPotato (Movie Downloading)

> Transmission (Torrents)

> CrashPlan (backups)

> Raspberry Pi Camera Streams (samba share)

> + more stuff

All these applications run in their own docker containers. I used to do local web development in a virtual machine, now it all sits on this server. Love it and it works 'magically'.

Connected to the TV is a Quad-core android TV Box.

Do I assume you pay for safe access to content but not for the content itself?

Guilty on some of the non-paid content. Make use of a VPN when needing to download.

Sounds like a good setup!

CouchPotato seems neat. Are you familiar with any similar services for TV Shows? Often I like to enjoy obscure shows that don't make it to Netflix.

Thanks!

I haven't had time to use this: http://www.sickbeard.com/

But a lot recommend it on reddit.

Mac Mini with a Drobo (30tb raw space - 6tb x 5). I have it setup with double redundancy so the space is about 12tb less. Currently using about 11tb. This Mac Mini also does other things like web hosting, file sharing, XCode build, cache, Software Update, etc.

Apple TV and iOS devices to view the content.

I have iTunes content from about 2007 along with DVD's I own that I have ripped

2 Roku's and an old laptop running plex. I'd like to move to a central setup with general file storage at some point. Potentially even tie in to be more of a home hub with power tracking etc.

A deal-breaker would be losing remotes that Roku offer (or similar alternatives) as they make media viewing simple and easy for adults, kids and guests alike.

Hardware: NAS, Raspberry Pi 2, Logitech diNovo, PC.

Software: Kodi+Exodus, Plex, Moonlight (+ Steam on the PC).

I do everything that the Pi can do directly on the Pi (which is a lot). For every other purpose (including games), I stream from my PC with Steam in-home streaming.

I like MythTV: a client/server based TV-Recording application. Very good at planning recordings, avoiding conflicts etc. MythTv ss able to handle multiple sources (Cable, Satellit, IP-TV, DVB ... , to play DVD and much more.

Personally I'm using a Playstation 3 and Plex. Maybe not the most sexy of solutions, but it's cheap, has worked flawlessly for years and I can even play games on it if the mood takes me.

+1 for cheap and easy. I'm using a Playstation 4 + USB thumb drive. It was the cheapest & easiest set up I could find that would play files from a storage device, and give me a remote.

Before the PS4, I was pretty happy with my Google Chromecast, but it can't play video files unless you stream them over a network. I also got tired of using my phone and/or browser as a remote.

Raspberry Pi 3 running OSMC. Connect an external HDD and plug it to your TV. I use Yatse on Android to control it. It also doubles up as a NAS if you want to watch movies on other devices.

I use my gaming desktop as a Plex media server as well. I jut stream to various devices around the house (like the FireTV).

Works very well, even while I'm playing a game.

Android TV with Plex and Kodi, and a Mac with Plex server installed. I really need a Plex capable NAS to not have to wake up my mac.

Rasp3 running openelec / kodi, never looked back. All Open Source, not snooping on you :)

Raspberry Pi 2 running OpenELEC (Kodi), with a large USB HDD attached. It doubles as my NAS.

I just have the latest Apple Tv

TV -- Raspberry Pi 2 / Raspbian / Kodi -- 3TB disk

Remote control with Kodi iOS apps.

A 2010 Mac mini connected to the TV and Logitech keyboard with trackpad

Apple TV and a Mac that I use to stream movies to the Apple TV.

Raspberry Pi 3 + OSMC (Kodi) + 2 HDD connected to the router.

chromecast

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