Ask Slashdot: How To Make My Own Hardware Multimedia Player? 140
An anonymous reader writes "I was looking at multimedia players from brands such as SumVision, Noontec and Western Digital. They all seem to be some device which accepts a USB hard-drive and commands from an IR remote control, and throws the result over HDMI. I have my own idea of what a hardware multimedia player should do (e.g. a personalized library screen for episodes, movies and documentaries; resume play; loudness control; etc.). I also think it will a good programming adventure because I will have to make the player compatible with more than a few popular codecs. Is this an FPGA arena? Or a mini-linux tv-box? Any advice, books or starting point to suggest?" There certainly have been a lot of products and projects in this domain over the years, but what's the best place to start in the year 2012?
Raspberry Pi (Score:5, Informative)
XBMC (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The easy way (Score:5, Informative)
Even with the best of tools and setups, pure streaming is not always an option. My synology NAS barfs on .mp4s sometimes.
Your NAS doing DLNA is doing more than a NAS needs to. XBMC happily supports connecting to Samba or SFTP shares within the application, or you could just use NFS and attach the NAS share to the local filesystem. If a NAS cares about what type of file it's sending over a plain filesystem access protocol like that it's a broken NAS.
Just went 'back' to XBMC. (Score:4, Informative)
Was using PS3 w/Media Centre (DLNA streaming app) on a PC.
Then I read up cinavia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia [wikipedia.org]
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1265114 [avsforum.com]
Decided to convert my NAS
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=hp%20microserver&hl=en&meta= [google.com.au] into a HTPC with a slimline video card (40$) and put XBMC on it (plus XBMC remote for Android, no IR, no bluetooth required)
Has been better than expected, XBMC came a long long long way since my Xbox 1.
Playback is smooth, UI is good, even installed MySQL on the little NAS and now the library can be accessed around the house easily with multiple copies of XBMC tied in to the main box.
Very good stuff.
Re:The easy way (Score:4, Informative)
I see you failed to full understand the post you replied to. The point here is not to have to transcode at all.
AppleTV is just as limited as the other "appliances". Apple is all NIH when it comes to OGG and FLAC audio, or video files in MKV containers, or even MP4 if you don't use the "right" h264 profiles.
WD and the Chinese no-name devices actually accept more media types than an AppleTV.