TV/Setup advice please!

ludicrousgib · 3 Nov 2015 at 20:37

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?

ludicrousgib · 4 Nov 2015 at 07:56

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.

ludicrousgib · 4 Nov 2015 at 08:04

As an alternative to running plex off a NAS (which seems only high end/expensive ones can do) could I build an always-on media PC, and run plex off that?

ludicrousgib · 5 Nov 2015 at 08:29

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.