Re: [PLUG] Media Frontend Hardware

["Gavin W. Burris" <bug@sas.upenn.edu>]

Hi Rich,

Since my Shuttle PC motherboard failed after only one year of use, I
just upgraded to an Asus Eee Box.  It has an Intel Atom D510 and NVIDIA
ION.  With Fedora installed, hooked up to a eSATA RAID, I'm good to go
with XBMC.

I also have a Roku, but it does not do uPnP.  It has "channel" apps that
play everything from your subscription of Netflix, Amazon, UFC, etc.
There are no commercials.

I would suggest upgrading to a budget flat panel with a VGA connection.
 You can also configure Linux to use HDMI, since HDMI is a smaller
connector for DVI with audio added in.

Cheers.


On 06/25/2011 04:02 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Bill East <wm.east@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 12:06 PM, Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm open to alternative suggestions as well.  (I took a quick look at
>>> XBMC - not sure I'd use it as a substitute for a frontend, but I might
>>> be talked into that.)
>>>
>> My impression of XBMC is that it is not really a substitute for MythTV
>> although it could be a good adjunct to it. The two projects do very
>> different things, with XBMC being a front end to your stored media and
>> MythTV acting more as a DVR. But I could be wrong.
> 
> That is my concern.
> 
> My issue was actually caused by trying to upgrade to 0.24.1.  Rather
> than try to rush the project I decided to roll-back (always make
> backups!), and I'm running fine again on 0.22 (which is ancient).  I'm
> still interested in suggestions and will research my options and take
> my time about doing the upgrade.
> 
> I've contemplating whether it makes more sense to just ditch myth and
> go with some other TV retrieval option.  I'm not sure that any of the
> other options will give us 100% coverage on the shows we watch,
> however.  Plus, relying on torrents/etc is probably going to be a bit
> of pain - even setting aside the legal issues.  I'm also under
> contract with my FIOS bill for a while longer...
> 
> Oh, one other requirement I didn't mention is SPDIF audio.
> 
> So far the kinds of options I'm seeing are:
> 
> 1.  Get a newer ITX motherboard and upgrade my existing hardware.  The
> options here don't seem great from a future-proofing standpoint as I'm
> not sure any of those options use FOSS drivers.
> 
> 2.  Get an Apple TV, figure out how to root it without a mac, and
> install XBMC on it.  Life with having mythtv buried under three layers
> of sub-menus (XBMC on Apple TV doesn't replace the stock interface,
> and mythtv is a layer lower unless I figure out a better way of doing
> it).
> 
> 3.  Buy a really cheap desktop with the outputs I need - but that is
> pricier and likely to take much more space/etc.  This will of course
> give me the most long-term flexibility (I could even run Gentoo on it,
> or a live-USB based solution of some kind which will simplify
> upgrades).
> 
> 4.  Buy some other media player that supports UPnP/etc - like Roku.
> This is cheap and simple, but Roku at least is limited in codec
> support, and it would be limited to playback only with no commercial
> skip most likely.  Seems like a big step backwards...
> 
> Suggestions continue to be welcome...
> 
> Rich
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-- 
Gavin W. Burris
Senior Systems Programmer
Information Security and Unix Systems
School of Arts and Sciences
University of Pennsylvania
___________________________________________________________________________
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