[DennyL]

I have just bought a lovely Panasonic TV (TX-P42G30B). I have many video files, some HD, on my MacBook Pro and on USB-attached hard disks. I'm looking for a box of tricks that will enable me to play the video files on my TV. Can anyone suggest what I need? I imagine something that will attach to the TV, possibly via HDMI, and which can browse out across my home wifi network, maybe using a browser-based interface, and select files or folders (for .VOBs) on network-connected devices to stream them to the TV. Maybe HD data rate is too much for wifi, I don't know. At a push I'd be satisfied with it accessing a locally-connected USB 2 hard disk instead of wifi, but wifi would be nice. I once had an IcyBox hard disk enclosure/media player, but I could never got it to work because the remote wouldn't talk to it, so I'm hoping someone can suggest something that they can recommend from experience. From Googling I see that there are few cheap boxes from the likes of Sumvision and Xenta. Philips seems to have a range.....

Thank you for any suggestions.

[next010]

The P42G30B is a DLNA device, if your not too fussed about it you can install a DLNA server like Serviio on your Macbook and stream media to it. The Panasonic media player on those sets is very poor with limited media support so Serviio will transcode video that doesn't work to make it play. You might have to set the Panasonic Viera profile to the IP of the TV if Serviio doesnt guess it automatically in Serviio control panel.

If you can live with that then you don't have to buy anything however DLNA doesn't handle multiple vobs or iso images so I would recommend running your DVD's through MakeMKV or VOB2MPG which will extract the movie to a .single mkv or .mpg container (no quality loss). That way you have a single video that can be played through DLNA.

If getting a media player and you want it to be Mac friendly a Boxee Box would do the trick, it can access AFP (Apple network shares) so you don't have to setup samba/smb but Boxee also provide a Boxee Media Manager app which sets up shares for you from the Macbook, it can read HFS+ volumes too and has built in wireless though the Boxee wireless is useless for HD video material. Lastly is has basic Airplay support which means no DRM media supported so no mirroring or iTunes movies etc.

[DennyL]

Thank you for your very helpful remarks and suggestions.

I spent much of yesterday Googling around this problem, and came close to ordering a Sumvision Cyclone Micro 3.

It did occur to me that, with a MacBook and TV connected by wifi, I should have enough hardware horsepower to get files from the MacBook to the TV, and I was wondering about a software solution. I came across this:-

View Document

and I was going to try EyeConnect software. Now, following your suggestion, I shall try Serviio software.

The Boxee Box looks very good, and I might get that, although for the moment my focus is more on using video files that I have, rather than accessing Internet streams, so I shall see whether I can progress using only software. I have a vague long term play to get a Mac Mini as a media server. I already use Squeezebox for audio, running on a Win XP box, so I can also look at Windows software.

I suspect that HD video stretches wifi data rate capabilities, and I shall favour accessing local hard disks over using wifi with freezes and stops and starts.

Thank you again for your help.

[NX3]

If you get problems with HD over Wifi I'd suggest looking at Homeplugs, they start at £35 for 200mpbs and are a much better option for wiring your devices using your existing electricity cables.

Also I'd highly recommend Serviio, its free unlike the solution your looking at.

[next010]

Yeah HD over wireless isn't really feasible unless your very lucky. You'd have to have decent wireless network kit all the same brand like an Apple Airport Extreme with Airport Express acting as ethernet to wireless bridge all running in 802.11n mode and even then there's still no guarantee it would be fast enough.

As NX3 says homeplugs would be better path to take.

Serviio runs on OSX & Windows too.

[DennyL]

I have installed Serviio on my Windows XP box and I'm really impressed how good a piece of software it is. It worked more-or-less straight away so that I could select it on my TV. But I do think it has a problem which for me might be a deal-breaker: it doesn't do subtitles. It claims to do subtitles from .SRT files when the file name is the same as the name of the corresponding video file. I see from the Serviio forums that many are struggling with this, and some think it only works with .AVI files. It didn't work for me with a .MP4 file.

Some of my ripped .AVI files, which are watchable on my 13" MacBook Pro are too soft to watch on my 42" TV. Of the two large files I have which are ripped from Blu-ray, one looked good up on the screen of my TV, but it kept stopping and jerking, not occasionally but all the time. The other had a slightly wrong ratio. My TV offered three ratios: 'Original', 'Aspect1' and Aspect2'. Original made the image shrink to the middle of the screen and both the others were the same, with the image filling the screen but slightly stretched vertically.

I can also see that there is a big problem around pausing and fast-forwarding movies.

Because I'm not very skilled, when there is a problem I don't always know where it is a problem of the media server, the DNLA standard, or the TV functionality.

There are a lot of things a system needs to get right, and I'm wondering whether any system out there covers all the bases well enough. I haven't given up on Serviio, and I may look at TV Mobili and at Plex. I'm not sure about Twonky. Then there's EyeConnect. After that it's hardware. Does hardware offer a big step-up in functionality and control? I'm still a bit tempted by the Sumvision Cyclone Micro 3 because it's cheap and by the Boxee, which seems like a high-quality product.

I am a Squeezebox user and quite a long time ago I fitted a couple of Homeplugs, and they worked easily and straight away. I went to the kitchen pleased with myself and with the music playing and made a cup of coffee. Within five minutes the music stopped. I put the Homeplugs back into their boxes and sold them on Ebay. Maybe I was unjust with them. I do think reliability is important, and when I feel like watching a movie or listing to music it means I don't feel like doing IT problem-solving, especially as my server is upstairs and I live downstairs. I do use VNC as much as I can to manage my server. I can see that getting wifi out of the equation might be a good thing to do when setting up a media server.

Thank you again for your suggestions.

[xmb]

Wait until Mountain Lion is out and get an Apple TV. Then you can use AirPlay mirroring to project your MacBook Pro screen onto the TV. If you have an iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad you can use them to control your Mac remotely to select what you want to play back.

[xmb]

Otherwise look at the WD TV Live since this supports subtitles and can access your files directly if needed (ideally setup a NAS media server to keep all your media in one place and serve them up without having to keep a PC running).

[next010]

The DLNA standard doesn't support subtitles so yeah that's another problem with it, some DLNA media players have their own way of doing subtitles but the server and client must both support that particular way. As a way around that some DLNA servers force transcoding the video and burn the subtitles into the video stream so they are viewable.

How you can force Serviio to do this I'm not sure, I never looked into it, the Serviio forums may be of more help.

Proper aspect ratios are another problem for TV media players they tend to not be very good at that either, it is possible to soft alter the aspect ratio of a video using mkvmerge but I don't think it would be of any help in this situation if the TV is stretching out the videos regardless. There is also the transcoding factor if serviio is converting the video something may be going awry somewhere or it's just the TV's media player.

The skipping and jerking could be the wireless network (definitely is if raw Blu-ray), the only way to know for sure would be to run a long ethernet cable from the TV to the router and test the same videos again.

It's worth trying other DLNA servers, Serviio is one of the better ones and free but it may not be best for everything out there, one of the best commercial DLNA servers is Mezzmo.

I'd go with the WDTV Live over the Cyclone, it's a better quality product the Cylcone is a very primitive player.

[DennyL]

Well, I've gone and bought a Western Digital TV Live. Thank you for telling me about it, XMB. All things being equal I would have gone for the Boxee (thank you for telling me about it, Next010), but the WD got quite cheap on Amazon and it's half the price of the Boxee. Also, the Boxee seems to focus on Internet sources, and at this stage my interest is more on the media I have at home. The online sources seem to be a bit like the channels on my TV - numerous but with few of any interest (to me).

The WD does more-or-less what I want, and has played all the file types I've tried so far without problems, and I've had no difficulties with subtitles.

When I was setting the WD up it couldn't find my Windows network shares, although my MacBook can. It did see the Serviio server, which was still running. This forced me to connect my USB hard disk directly to the WD, and all was fine. I had been slow to do this because I didn't know at that point that the WD would make the connected HD available as a network share. It does.

The only Internet resource I'm interested in, apart from iPlayer (which my new Panasonic TV does natively pretty well), is Flickr, because I have a paid account there. The WD does go to Flickr, but as it can't log in to my account it's useless. This is nuisance because I had made the decision to keep my photographs at Flickr, mainly for backup reasons, as it makes available unlimited storage. I wasn't able to find out whether a Boxee can log on to a Flickr account. Other online resources I could be interested in are Film4oD, Curzon On Demand and LoveFilm. (When I go to the Netflicks Web site I can't browse or search their database to 'test' it. So I don't know about them.)

I could have waited for Mountain Lion and bought an Apple TV, and may end up doing this because AirPlay Mirroring may solve all my problems. When I thought about it I was sceptical about it mapping the pixels on my MacBook to my TV and ending up with good quality and the correct aspect ratio, but I'll certainly be looking at this. The setup I have now (Panasonic + WD) does a very good job of getting the ratio right without me intervening.

I shan't be using the WD much for music because I have a couple of Squeezeboxes. In fact having Squeezebox, iTunes + iPhone (with iPeng), and now the WD, makes my head hurt when I try to think about how best to manage my music!

Thank you again to all who contributed to this thread.

[next010]

It should see the network shares, try the XBMC guide on sharing out via Windows it almost always works. Network Magic is an app which can simply sharing out folders too.

I couldn't say why the flickr app doesn't let you login on the WDTV Live, I can only suggest asking on the WDTV Live support forums, someone may know better.

There is a flickr app for Boxee & it does play local videos but as the Boxee Box 1 is no longer supported you'd never see any of those other services you mention on it & there wont be any major updates or fixes to it.

Well the WDTV Live is a DLNA renderer, if Squeezebox can output to DLNA devices then the music will get pushed to the WDTV Live sort of like Airplay.