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Comment by praeclarum | Hacker News Reader

As someone who used an Ubuntu box for a media player for 6 months, I have to say that Linux is _almost_ good enough. My major problems included:

(1) Because there was no cooperation between the decoders and video cards, playing HD 1080p content at 60 FPS would skip a lot. Perhaps a beefier CPU would help, but the same machine running Windows had no trouble.

(2) Samba, or at least Ubuntu's version of it, is very flaky. Some days it would see my networked drives, other days it wouldn't.

(3) Moonlight does not handle DRM content from Netflix. If my TV or XBOX did not already handle Netflix, then this would have been a show stopper.

All that said, I did run it that way for 6 months, so I guess it was "good enough".

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(2) Samba, or at least Ubuntu's version of it, is very flaky. Some days it would see my networked drives, other days it wouldn't.

The SMB client on your Ubuntu media player would have trouble seeing network drives?

Make sure everything is in the same broadcast subnet and ethernet segment, and make sure that you aren't running NetBIOS ("Windows File Sharing") over anything other than TCP/IP, not NetBeui -- this shouldn't be a problem with more recent Windows versions, but every so often it pops up.

Also, you might have luck if you disable nmbd in your samba clients and let a Windows machine be the master browser, especially if your media player linux machine isn't always on.

But I guess this is all moot if you've moved onto some other solution. Maybe this will help someone else.

It's very helpful thanks. Honestly, I am disliking the WIndows experience more than I disliked the Ubuntu experience, so I will probably give it another go.

To be thoroughly honest, I don't know if it was Samba acting up on me or if it was the Ubuntu file browser (Nautilus?). Every couple days or so, I would have to click the refresh repeatedly for about 30s in order to get it to see the network shares. Was that Samba's fault or GNOMEs? I don't have the knowledge to say either way.

Thank you for the information.

I don't know if it was Samba acting up on me or if it was the Ubuntu file browser (Nautilus?). Every couple days or so, I would have to click the refresh repeatedly for about 30s in order to get it to see the network shares. Was that Samba's fault or GNOMEs? I don't have the knowledge to say either way.

Whenever it's visibility of machines with Windows file sharing, 90% of the time it is what I've described above -- it's neither Samba nor Gnome's fault. The best thing you can do for the browsablity of your network (once you've ensured that NetBuei isn't in use), if you have an always on non-Windows machine (anything that will run Samba), is run Samba on it with nmbd enabled, even if you don't share anything from that samba instance itself. By default, Samba will always win network elections to become the master browser. Since it always wins, the list of hosts that are sharing is more consistent. Obviously, if you want to access shares on a machine that isn't always on, it takes a while (about 30s or so) after that machine boots to show up in the browse list reliably.

Another thing, if you have a bridged network, with both wireless and wired segments (which might be the case with a media player PC), run samba/nmbd on the wired segment. If a wireless machine that is the master browrser loses connectivity, a network election might need to take place and different machines might become the master browser, and they don't always have the full list of machines all the time.

> playing HD 1080p content at 60 FPS would skip a lot.

Did you get VDPAU set up? http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU

I've just set up a myth box for my sister, my advice is research tv and video card before buying components. saved 20 bucks and got a cheep card... but it doesn't have drivers in stock ubuntu kernel. it works but takes some fiddling. also stick to nvidia for video card.

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