Media Streaming help

[Paino]

Hi Guys,

New to all this and am totally confused. Basically I have ripped all my music onto my NAS in FLAC and want a player that will play all my music. I would like it to show cover art and be able to generate playlists. However I'm looking to rip my DVD's and Blu Ray's to my NAS and would like the same sort of functionality i.e. a jukebox. I have read about the Dune HD TV 101 and the fact you can use Zappiti to create a movie jukebox but not a music one.

Therefore is there anything out there that will cater for both, or am I going to have to buy separate products?

Many Thanks.

 

[next010]

Popcornhour A300, the jukebox is internal and scans music, movies with playlist/shuffle support. The Popbox v8 Syabas cut down player lacks the internal jukebox of the A300.

 

[MarkE19]

I'm afraid it is a 2 box solution to get what you want as no media players handle music that well.
If you don't mind going the more DIY route you could get a low powered PC such as an Acer Revo and run XBMC on it as I believe that does all you want in the one box.

Mark.

 

[MarkE19]

Popcornhour A300, the jukebox is internal and scans music, movies with playlist/shuffle support.

Does this allow you to create an on the fly playlist or do they need to be already created?

Mark.

 

[next010]

On the fly playlist creation but only from music scanned into the internal jukebox not from file browsing.

But I agree music playback is very shoddy for most media players. Even Boxee Box's music playback is nothing more than file/album despite it's XBMC origins and automatic jukebox, you have to resort to exporting playlists.

 

[Paino]

Ok, so the Popcornhour device will scan my NAS, and be able to show me cover art of all my music and DVD's as well as create playlists of music?

Thanks.

 

[next010]

Actually you might want to hold off on the A300 looking at their forums there appear to be problems with Flac audio. You can see the jukebox here by looking at video 4, audio is around the 4:50 mark displaying browse by playlist. Just in case I'm wrong you might want to ask on their forums in that thread as I swore I saw a video with the NMJ tagging music for playlists but it's not in that video but a queue function is.

Another option and an awful lot cheaper is the AppleTV2 running XBMC, this will give you the best music playback options plus best video jukebox hands down but it only has hardware acceleration for H.264 video which means you will have to compress your Blu-ray's using x264, DVD's you can just about get away without converting.

 

[MarkE19]

IIRC the AppleTV2 is also only 720p so not full HD

Mark.

 

[Paino]

Argghh nightmare, surely there is a gap in the market for an all-in-one device? Does anyone have experience of the WD Live 2011, it's a lot cheaper than many of it's rivals.

Thanks.

 

[next010]

The WDTV Live's are a no go either, they support reading playlists for video/audio but don't support creating them in the player even though they have a playlist creation system for the Youtube plugin on the player.

Tvix players are one of the others that do have built in playlist creation but they have no real jukebox, you can dump some jpg files into folders and it will display those in a sort of hybrid thumbnail/file view mode but it's not very good.

I'm not sure which if the older Tvix players support playlist creation but the Xroid A1 definitely does, see page 36 of it's manual.