What is the best solution for my wants?

Laurence-UK

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I've been looking recently at a lot of boxes etc and am struggling to work out which would be best for what I want to achieve. My criteria is:

1. I want to rip all my DVD's and Blu Ray's on to a NAS drive and stream them to the box and tablets in the house. I have no need for 3D rips or any HD audio capabilities, just standard 1080P and 5.1.

2. I would like the ability to run emulators with ROMs of my own games (not acquired online) stored on the NAS drive if possible. If not then the ROMs can be stored on the box itself but would need quite a bit of storage.

3. Ability to use either a Playstation or Xbox controller to play games. Ideally wireless but can be wired if needs be.

4. Install newer games to play from some sort of games store.

5. Install apps like iPlayer. I have no need for Netflix.

6. It needs to be wife compatible to small and easy to use.

7. The deal breaker...all for under £100.

The two most likely candidates seem to be an Nvidia Shield or Raspberry Pi 2 but I'm not sure if they'll meet my requirements. Also, the setup learning curve needs to be relatively simple for myself to get to grips with which has me a little worried about the Pi.

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions, I know I'm asking a lot!
 
I'm a big fan of the Pi2, and use four around my home to stream HD/3D & 5.1 content from my centralised server to four different tv's. You can install apps such as iplayer and Netflix too.

What I'm not sure about is the gaming side. I know previous builds of xbmc/Kodi/OSMC used to have rom capability but not sure if current ones do.

What consoles do you want to emulate?
Is the requirement for an Xbox or PlayStation controller a deal breaker?
 
A PS or Xbox controller isn't a deal breaker but I would like to use some kind of traditional controller to play games.

I would like to emulate up to and including the PS2 and N64 generation.

How simple is the setup of a Pi for what I want to do? Do you have to install on OS on to them? If so, what would be best?

Thanks
 
Hmnnn. You can try and use a pi for an all in one solution but I'm not convinced it'll work out. I think asking a tiny microPC to be a HD media player but also run a variety of emulators and controllers is a bit much.

Would you consider a pi with 2 SD cards? And swap between them for media and games? Or even 2 Pi's? At about £50 each including case etc, it'll still be about budget.

If so, put OSMC (previously Kodi/xbmc) on one card and use it as your media player. It's dead easy to set up and there's tonnes of guides and info.

Then take a look at retropi for the emulators.
 

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