TV/Setup advice please!

ludicrousgib

ludicrousgib

ludicrousgib

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6 Jul 2013
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I'm a little bit clueless when it comes to home entertainment setups, which is suprising given the amount of TV that I watch.

In a nutshell, I want to make mine/the mrs/the kids tv watching experience better.

We download allot of things to watch, and by watching I mean copying to a usb stick, and playing via the otherwise pretty much redundant blu-ray player.

What I would like to do, is have a digital library, which can be streamed to the 3 rather dated TV's in the house.

My thinking (again, a bit clueless) is to get a NAS, and then something (XMBC?) connected to each TV.

I've also seen WD Streamers, which would also seem to do the job of playing from the NAS.

I think that would work.

The NAS could be connected to the router wired, no problem, but the XBMC box's would be wireless. I currently only have a crap sky router, so could upgrade if need be.

Does that sound about right, or am I going about it completley the wrong way?
 
Your going in the right direction, actual implementation is a different matter.
Top of my head simple solution
Meaty NAS to run plex server
3 fire tv's/sticks running plex client
Fly in the ointment is the wifi, the fire devices support wifi, but it depends upon on how good a connection you can get and whether it will support 3 streams at once (worse case raw bd rips your looking at 120+Mb/s, which is als above std routers 100Mb/s lan connection)
so you may also need another router plus wifi extenders.

Do you have a budget in mind?
 
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Thanks for the reply!

Ref the wifi, one of the TV's could/would be hardwired. I have no objection to improving the standard sky router to something more worthwhile. I couldn't hardwire the other 2, but could potentially use powerline adaptors.

I dont have a budget as such, but I guess I'd like it to be <£500, including everything needed, ie router, powerlines, nas, playback devices.
 
I'm basically in the same situation as you, 2 tv's upstairs not hard wired, nor do they have wifi/smart capability.
Currently running openelec on an old amd Athlon x264 4200 connected to the tv which also has all my media on. I should be able to share the media off this box.
Just picked up a pi2, found an old usb wifi n dongle which should work.
Option 2 will be a cheap router running in bridge mode then hard wiring the pi to that if usb wifi connection isn't stable/fast enough. Cheap router £15-20.

One thing to consider is remote controls, the fire devices come with them, pi supports tv remote if tv supports hdmi-cec.
Another option is cheap android based media streamers, they generally have kodi loaded, support wifi and come with remotes.

EDIT just checked out the file sharing side, while playing a raw bd rip, copied some files across and back from the drive that the file was being played from @11MB/s playback didnt stutter. Just got to get the pi setup to see if its anygood.
 
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Thanks.

Im doing allot of reading and slowly getting my head around it.

With the NAS, if I was using eg firesticks with kodi, they would be doing the decoding, so would it matter if it was a cheaper NAS?

Running plex off the nas would mean needing an expensive one, and basically blowing my budget. As far as I can tell in any case.
 
As above post I'm going to use the main kodi box (6yr old hw) as a nas,

Dont think kodi does any decoding processor wise as it uses the hw capabilities of the graphics chips.

Plex can be set to run in direct mode.

Kodi wise, If you've got any old pc hardware and a usb stick or two install openelec, grab a firestick sideload kodi and see how things run with the old hardware acting as a NAS.

Plex wise install plex media server on your main pc, then test plex on firestick.

You can build a NAS for about £180, (HP microserver + 2tb disk)

Your local Tescos should have a firestick.
 
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