Budget media streamer for bedroom?

flyfour

Standard Member
Joined
Oct 13, 2008
Messages
9
Reaction score
0
Points
5
I've got an unusual setup of obscure devices, and realised that my bedroom is one area I have neglected - but now the missus is keen to "catch up" with the rest of the house.

Currently our media is stored in three places -

1. A Media Center PC (XP Media Center 2005) connected to the main living room TV - this is not used for recording TV, this is just used to store and watch videos/DVD's that we have ripped - in mainly DivX/XVid and WMV formats. These videos are watched directly on this TV, and also by our daughter who browses directly to the PC shares using Media Player on a PC in her bedroom.

2. A PC in the loft, which has a DVB-T tuner collecting occasional TV recordings but only when Sky+ is too busy recording other channels or recording whilst we watch something else back. Also our MP3 collection is on this PC. TV recordings made here are watched on our laptops or on the Media Center PC in the living room. MP3's are accessed using a Freecom MusicPal in the bedroom.

3. A Network Hard Drive device with TV out (indistinguishable Maplin product with HDD) - this is connected to the bedroom TV but we rarely use it because of the effort involved moving media to it (requires proprietary software on any PC that accesses it on the LAN), also it doesn't play WMV's or the latest DivX codecs. It also only works in one mode at a time - switched to network drive mode it is accessible from the PC's as a remote hard disk, but then it has to be switched back to TV mode in order to playback. It doesn't work as a streaming device (ie. streaming media from other locations), only a storage/playback device - but not both at the same time - and it's got a fan in it and is noisy.

Although our router does have wireless (b/g), we barely use it because the house walls are very thick and the coverage is poor - so all our networked devices are using 85mbps homeplug devices (networking over the mains), which seem to give adequate speed for all the video/audio formats we have streamed over them so far.

The bedroom TV is a CRT that we have no plan to replace - the easiest thing I could do is put a second Media Center PC in there, which could happily play anything on any of the other devices - but I don't want a PC because (a) it would need to be relatively beefy and therefore expensive and (b) the TV isn't up to using as a PC monitor so it would be overkill to have a PC there just as a media playback device.

I did consider a second-hand Linksys Media Center Extender but they don't seem to handle DivX or XVid recordings?

So I'm looking for a cheap (hopefully under £70) wired-LAN capable device that will stream video in multiple formats from disk shares or UPnP connections on several PC's, and output to Scart. Any suggestions?

D. :lease:
 
buy an original xbox running xbmc. it will connect easily to your tv, play anything, and can store films on the internal hd as well as stream.





you can take mine off me for £40 + postage and it comes with a 250gb hd installed :thumbsup:
 
I am also in the same boat as the opener of this thread, however I am little bit confuse on the xbox recommendation

I can see from this and other thread that Xbos comes highly recommended however if is Xbox not quite noisy.

If ou guys think that the noise is very low than I would be happy happy to get one

If anyone want to get rid of there please let me known I am base in London and would be happy to pay with paypal.

Thanks

buy an original xbox running xbmc. it will connect easily to your tv, play anything, and can store films on the internal hd as well as stream.





you can take mine off me for £40 + postage and it comes with a 250gb hd installed :thumbsup:
 

The latest video from AVForums

TV Buying Guide - Which TV Is Best For You?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom