Home Theatre PC Setup (Software question mainly)

Mulder

Mulder

Mulder

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Hi all,

Am looking to buy an HTPC (probably something like this) to use in a living room set up. Main purpose will be to browse videos/pictures/music etc held on an external USB device. It's for a 74 year old so needs to be easy to use.

Anyone have any recommendations for which software is best to use? Windows Media Centre seems pretty rubbish from what I've seen. Also is it possible to use a remote control for basic functions like play, pause, choose video etc?

Any tips much appreciated.

Thanks
 
Why spend all that on a NUC? Why not use a cheaper Android/Android TV/Linux solution running Kodi or one of it's forks. From my personal point of view I can't recommend the Vero 4K running OSMC highly enough (not the cheapest, cheap generic Chinese Android boxes are much cheaper but support is poor and come with many problems), it's the most efficient well supported media boxes I have come across and comes with everything you need to use it including remote.

Another box to look at is the NVidia Shield TV but it's probably overkill for requirements and isn't the "killer" box it used to be due to developers taking it in a direction contrary to userbase requests.
 
Oooft. Expensive. I use xbox ones as my streaming devices, with the official xbox media remote. They can be picked up cheap second hand (around £100), or sometimes (such as black friday) have deals that once you have sold on the bundles games, makes them very cheap new (I got a 1TB with 6 games, 3 of which were new games worth £30+ each second hand, for £240, so sell the games, probably only pay less than £140 for a new one).

I use PLEX mostly for streaming content from my server, but the media player works well too for playing content off of USB. Both apps can be pinned to the start menu, and so can be accessed very easily. Obviously the regular Netflix and Amazon prime can also be installed, along side other regular TV apps.
 
Thanks for the replies. He's currently using a WDTV streamer which is really slow and doesn't have good functionality. I've used Kodi and it doesn't seem to have the ability to search, organise etc files like a dedicated HTPC might have. It also needs to be able to play a very wide variety of video types and also music/pictures etc which I know some streamers will struggle with.

I was thinking of going full HTPC just to make sure it has the functions he needs. But not sure what software would be best and also not sure how to get a remote control to work with it.
 
Mulder said:
.............. I've used Kodi and it doesn't seem to have the ability to search, organise etc files like a dedicated HTPC might have. It also needs to be able to play a very wide variety of video types and also music/pictures etc which I know some streamers will struggle with......
Click to expand...

I think you might want to revisit what you know. Kodi is by far one of the most adaptable interfaces to manage media through. I also haven't yet come across a media format that a decent (i.e. not cheap Chinese generic tat) streamer and Kodi can't handle.

HTPC's are awkward, often unintuitive, generally lack specific support and everyone I've ever known who's built one (including me ;)) end up dumping them for a device designed for the purpose.

In short you'd be spending a lot of money on a device that lacks the efficiency of something designed for the purpose at often better than half the cost.
 
TheMightyTen said:
I think you might want to revisit what you know. Kodi is by far one of the most adaptable interfaces to manage media through. I also haven't yet come across a media format that a decent (i.e. not cheap Chinese generic tat) streamer and Kodi can't handle.

HTPC's are awkward, often unintuitive, generally lack specific support and everyone I've ever known who's built one (including me ;)) end up dumping them for a device designed for the purpose.

In short you'd be spending a lot of money on a device that lacks the efficiency of something designed for the purpose at often better than half the cost.
Click to expand...

^ This.

TBH, as good as Kodi is, and it is very very good, the bottom line is that it's still quite a complex bit of software for someone who yearns perhaps for the simplicity of VHS or DVD.

If you have a largish iOS/Android tablet or a laptop then you can install Kodi and set up access to some media files and see how the person you're trying to help copes with it. If they find it okay then yes, a Android box comes with a remote if that helps.
 
Thanks guys, as you can probably tell I'm a bit new to all this.

I actually have a WeTek core box but have never tried streaming network content or using OSMC. Presumably I could put OSMC on that and stream to the content to see what the functionality is like? Also would any generic keyboard work with a Kodi box? He ideally wants to be able to type when searching etc rather than having to navigate an alphabet using a mouse or remote control.
 
TheMightyTen said:
LibreELEC (see link below) is your friend if you have a WeTek and their support is very good, LibreELEC to the Core is what OSMC is to the Vero 4k, basically just enough Linux OS to run Kodi. Definitely one of the better streamers :)

https://libreelec.tv/downloads/wetek-core/
Click to expand...

Thanks. Looks like a bit of a pain to install but hopefully once done it's easy to use and has decent search functionality?

BillHicksRIP said:
Another recommendation for a Shield. My old folks can work it to get on iPlayer, Netflix and Prime as it's one big, round button on a simple controller.
Click to expand...

Do you know if you can search your network media library using the Shield?
 
Mulder said:
Thanks. Looks like a bit of a pain to install but hopefully once done it's easy to use and has decent search functionality?



Do you know if you can search your network media library using the Shield?
Click to expand...


I always say to people that the most important thing for being able to search media file is ensure that they are named and tagged correctly. If you have a big library it can be a bind to get it all named correctly at first but becomes routine after the current libraries are all sorted. Info on standard conventions below

http://kodi.wiki/view/Naming_video_files

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/categories/200028098-Media-Preparation

Naming files properly allows scrapers to back fill pertinent info within what ever interface you choose and usually scrape from MovieDB and TVDB (music can be a little more complicated but internal tagging generally fixes most issues). Any search is dependent on the quality of data it's working with so naming, tagging and scraping gives the richest resource to search on. :)
 
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