Spec me: bedroom TV HTPC alternative

you can pick up the very cheap now tv boxes(black ones are the newer ones) for around £8-10 and side load plex onto that, it already comes with the uk catch up series built in. as i said it is what i have done in my bedroom. you cannot beat that for £8 lol
 
Something to consider , if you have a library or films on your HTPC be sure they are in a format compatible with what ever streaming device you want to buy. for instance I have a lot of bluray rips in MKV but the audio on a lot of them is either AC3 or DTS which cannot be decoded on most players like roku or chromecast etc so I get no sound unless you can pass through your audio to a device (receiver) that can decode it. as you will be in your bedroom id imagine you dont have a receiver in there and you mentioned you have an old tv so I doubt that will be able to decode these audio formats either.

The only way to get past this is if you use your HTPC to trans-code your videos so hopefully your HTPC has the processing power to be able to do this.
 
Back to update as promised. In the end we got the Amazon Fire TV stick. Was going to get the Fire TV box and cable up, but decided to see how it worked over wifi since the signal seems okay and if it's not we can always get a box and use the stick in the guest room (which is nearer the router).

It works great, and is a nice little device. Put Plex on it straight away and installed the Plex Media Service on the HTPC. Super easy and quick to set up and streams fine over wifi. I guess if we were trying to stream lossless 4k content or something we'd need another solution, but for what we're using at the moment it works a treat. Really pleased with it.

It even seems to wake the HTPC over the network, which is a nice feature.

The startup times are a little slow, both for the stick itself and the Plex app, but otherwise it's great, especially for the cost.

Although... the stick did just bug out and throw up "connected with problems" "not connect to the internet" problems, which only cleared up when I got it to forgot and reconnect to the router. Hope this isn't something that becomes a regular annoyance.
 
New update:
The above issue did indeed become a regular annoyance!

To the point I now consider the Fire TV stick not fit for purpose. It NEVER wakes up with a working connection. I have to reset it every time before it will connect. And worst of all, the connection gets lost constantly, but unpredictably. Sometimes we'll manage to get through an episode of something, but mostly now it drops connection part-way through. After our last four attempts now to watch something have ended with it stopping after 10, 20, 30 minutes, we've decided not to keep the damn thing.

Hopefully the Fire TV box will be better, because if it worked properly the stick would actually be a nice device. But with a strong wifi signal in the room and all other devices working okay on the network, the problem has to lie with the device itself and it's just not usable.
 
Ok, sorry for double posting here (actually if you discoun the long gap between #43 and '44, I guess it's triple-posting...)

But: I'm now kind of torn between the Fire TV box, the Roku 3 and another Android box I've just seen, the T95Z Plus. The latter looks like a really well-specced Android box. It seems to have a few good reviews, but doesn't look like it's as mainstream a product as the other two. I'm a bit wary of the Fire TV products now as I assume the box uses the same wireless tech as the stick. The Roku sounds okay, but it's old tech and quite expensive for what it is. The T95Z is the same price but much higher specced it seems. It looks a bit too good to be true for the price, though and can't help wondering if they've skimped on quality somewhere. Don't suppose anyone here has any experience with this device?
 
Yeah, it's a nice enough device when it works. Although it is a bit slow at times too. In the end Amazon agreed to refund even though I'd thrown out the original packaging, which is good of them. Glad that was hassle-free. Picked up a Roku 3 since I've heard more positive comments about their ability to maintain connections. Also seems a slightly more flexible ecosystem than the Fire TV one, which was a bit obnoxious with its pushing of Amazon-specific content.

Keeping fingers crossed the Roku 3 plays better with our network, though as I say the signal is very good in the room we're using it in and we've been able to stream content to multiple other devices simultaneously. It was just the Fire stick that would bug out.
 
what was the bitrate of the material you were trying to stream ? much more than the sub 6Mb/s that iplayer/nowtv might use ?
Did you try the stick adjacent to the router ?
for the roku (guess not for stick) you can wire it to Lan or put the material on a usb too, to check that wifi is not the issue.
 
We tried a variety of material - whether it was iplayer/ITV hub, or streaming via Plex. It happened whatever we were doing with it. Even without actively streaming anything, the connection would occasionally drop, just on the menu screen.

We didn't try it adhacent to the router because we need it in the other room. And we know we have a good wifi signal there anyway.

It could always reconnect with either a reset or being told to "forget" the network and then loggin back in. But both of those methods are a pain and take time. If it could just reconnect in more simple manner or automatically try to pick back up a dropped connect it wouldn't be half as bad.

The option of using ethernet or USB storage was defnitely a factor in us going for the Roku in the end.
 
TBH I really like Roku equipment, I only had the Fire Stick as a temp device to stream media from the NAS, while I reinstalled an OS on the bedroom media PC.
That was over a year ago and it's done such a great job, I haven't felt the need to change it.
 
Was just going back pruning my old watched threads, and came across this one.

Thought the Roku 3 deserved an update!

After having the device for six months, we're really pleased with it. So much so that we bought a second one the other month for the spare room. Our first guest was so impressed with it he bought one for himself after going home. Good little bit of kit. Thanks to those who recommended it!
 
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