Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

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If you have a SmartTV you already have a simple media playback from any of your devices, and from usb storage its dumb easy just stick it in the tv... if you want the output to your smartphone then setup a dlna/upnp server somewhere and stick the usb storage into that.

Run a minidlna server there, and thats about it, now the TV can browse and play all the things Ive pointed minidlna too, and I can control the TV using upnp apps on my phone, its a nice touchy interface with UPnPlay that can also render the content on the phone if Id like.

A raspberry pi can run xbmc if you dont have a place/smallish-server where to run minidlna, and xbmc has a upnp-server, so you can mount your content over ftp/samba/http/upnp/nfs, or just plug your NAS into the raspberry.

Different networks? No problem, bridge them or use VPN and set a route for multicast.

EDIT: If anyone is interested I can write a blogpost about it as it wasnt long ago I tinkered with these setups. Especially IP multicasting was hairy.

Well you make it sound so easy! An issue with the technology is trying to keep up with it.

I have a basic HD tv (a samsung), it's not smart. It will play media from USB, and it plays a lot of formats - only it suffers with a few annoying quirks. I have sizing issues with the picture, and the media player doesn't let me turn the screen off. It almost works. DVD playback is pretty poor too with a separate LG player.

I don't want to run a separate media centre machine or NAS, all I want to do, is plug a drive into the TV. I don't even care for the IMDB stuff. Just the basics, easily locate file quickly, play it, play it from where I last paused etc. A Pi sounds promising - though I wonder how good the actual picture would be. Everytime I've tried XBMC or some such on a computer, the picture never appears that smooth.

Not everyone has a smart phone either. What I'd like is something like a Tablet, with HDMI out, and an SD card, and/or USB port - that I could quickly attach to the TV.

The basics feel neglected.

"Plug it in and turn your dumb HD tv into a 'Smart'" schenaningans is on the market, if you duck it there are several such USB-sticks, but I dont know how good any of them are. Its more fun making your own I belive, and you get to play with raspberry if you go that route.

Ive tried a Pi model B with XBMC and the output of it is indeed 1080p and looking smooth, it can play an HD file without stuttering/lagging over samba over openvpn. On the openvpn/samba server I have 30mbit up/down and Pi has 54mbit wifi then ADSL with up to 20mbit down.

Hm, if you dont want the Pi route, perhaps getting the cheapest andorid tablet with hdmi out would do well, as you can run a upnp-renderer on it, the tablet should have wifi as well. But then youd still have to run a dlna server on some of your computers, for example on laptop.

Thanks, can the Pi with Plex or XBMC, play straight from say a USB hard drive? What's the audio quality like on it?

There is no reason why it wouldnt play straight from a USB hard drive - but it only has 2 usb ports so keep that in mind, I used both of them - wireless keyboard/mouse and wifi.

You do need to know some Linux commands, I doubt/havent tried to see if XBMC can auto-mount things inserted. But that would be cool if it worked like that. Perhaps the raspbmc distribution has the automount setup done for you.

Audio quality, only had TV speakers to "try" it out with, sounded just like any other content, so I cant tell you if it suits for a high-end audio system, but the audio-over-hdmi worked with no fiddling from my side.

The Pi with OpenElec (XBMC) automounts USB drives. The onboard audio is supposed to not be great (crackles when there is USB load? Not sure if this is fixed). But if you're using the audio over HDMI to play through your TV, it should be fine.

OpenELEC also supports CEC so you can use your TV remote to directly control XBMC.

As someone who has an otherwise perfectly good TV but without any smart-TV addons (as I've understood are poor replacements for something like a Boxee), I'd love to see such a blog-post.

Good media management is more than just accessing files though. It's building a library, indexing, organizing, etc. As far as I've seen UPnP solutions, this has always been a lacking. How have you handled this?

The building a library/organizing - minidlna has handled that well, it scanned through my music and exposes Albums/Artist/Genre listings, not only the folder browser, and searching also works good. For now.

I am now looking to improve the quality of my music library so I am using beets to organize it right now, it corrects tags, fingerprint, deduplicate, fetch covers and so on. Its a tedious process because I do help it manually. Once its done, Ill use beetFs to expose the beets database of the collection on a new mountpoint, and thats where Ill point minidlna. That way beets wont need to change the tags on disk (screwing up the torrents hashes), or copy/move files around. But minidlna will get served the corrected tags through beetFs.

Its quite nice to just easily access huge music library on smartphone, good search and nice browsing, then download whatever artists or albums I like to the phone, or listen to, or select my brothers TV to play them on when Im at his house. Basically all of this functionality is in UPnP-av/DLNA with implementation by minidlna and UPnPlay.

Ive yet to setup a nice gallery/picture thing.

Ill get back to you once Ive made the blogpost (any suggestion where I can just write this and leave it there, github?), I made it sound easy, but I see thats because Ive spent the last few days playing with these stuff, have been trying out mediatomb, ushare and coherence too as servers, but as you say I wasnt pleased with their indexing.

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