[Scooder]

Hey all,


I'm doing work in an office, trying to make their new system user friendly. Basically, they have a bunch of LCD TV's, all with Coax runs to a utility room in the back of the building. I hooked up a ZV Pro 250 in the utility room, so now all the TVs can tune into channel 131 to receive hi-def over Coax to whatever is streaming from it.


What I'm looking for is a media player that can be controlled via network, since that's where the LAN cables all meet as well. That way I could have the receptionist (or whoever else) tell the media player to change movies from where ever she works. Does anyone know of a media player that can do this? It would have to have some kind of remote client software or a web UI. I guess I could make my own mini-PC to do the same, but hopefully something already exists. The options otherwise are to have a TV in the utlity room so they can fiddle with it from there to change media (not great), or start fishing a whole lot of component cable (not fun).


Any other ideas would be good too.

Thx.

[next010]

Cant think of any in home consumer space, probably something like that may exist in pro sector.

A mini-PC like Acer Revo or Asock Ion 330 running XBMC could feed a VGA signal to your ZV Pro 250 and maybe that can stream the GUI to the other TV's.

For controlling it there are a variety of ways through I'm personally not familiar with them, XBMC does have a web server and there is a mod that allows you to control XBMC via an Android Phone (install instructions) or via the iPhone.

They could basically act as the remote control to the PC running XBMC.

As for XBMC itself if using an Atom/Ion mini-PC there are a couple of things to be aware of with current official 9.04.1 release.
1) XBMC linux has GPU video decoding support but only for Nvidia GPU's and under linux. The Atom CPU is too weak to handle video so you need the GPU to do it.
2) You can install XBMC Live (standalone mini OS that boots straight into XBMC or install linux OS like Ubuntu & then install XBMC as an app.
3) There are a variety of minor issues that need to be addressed if installing XBMC Live 9.04.1 on an Ion PC this site shows them.

A new 9.11 alpha release is out but its still buggy and in no shape to be deployed in that environment but it does address all the issues in 3 so in a few months time I'd update it to that once the final version is out.

[Scooder]

Thanks for the input. On another forum VLC player was mentioned to do be able to do the same thing. I've looked into both and it looks like either could be an option at the least.

I'll keep checking back to this thread in case anyone has more suggestions

[next010]

VLC will also suffice though you'd have a PC desktop running it, XBMC is a media center software if you want employees to have a pretty GUI from which to select videos to play then its about the only option I can think of.

Edit: Forgot to add VLC lacks any form of video acceleration its pure CPU only so if going down that path and this is HD video were talking about make sure the computer has a very good CPU in it.