Question about HTPC and possible 2nd

[SchaibleTech]

question for anyone using a media streaming device, like a roku, boxee, etc. Maybe you can shed some light on this situation.

I have the HTPC over my girlfriends house in the main room. But she also has a TV in her bedroom. What's the easiest way to get access to all the movies on the HTPC in the main room and stream them to her bedroom? Because there are now 2tb of media on that main computer, and I'm not going to build another computer to put in her room...because that's going to consist of buying a 2tb and another HDD to put an OS on.

Not exactly sure the best way to go about this.

I thought about just buying the cheap 720p roku and a 1tb drive, but roku doensn't support all the file formats i have, so that's a bust.

[OvRiDe]

Well technically you wouldn't need to build a PC with a 2 TB drive. You could just build something that could map a drive to the main PC and play the media over the network. For instance you could use something like an Intel ATOM based board and something like XBMC to playback media in the bedroom. There are lightweight XBMC distro's and even a live distro that will fit on a flash drive. In that case you wouldn't even need a full hard drive. You would need just enough space to hold the operating system and settings.

Depending on the OS of the main system, you could pickup one of the MVIX players. I got one on sale a while back and the codec support is very good. I haven't had a video I cannot play on it yet, with exception to one MKV file that I have a suspicion was damaged when I copied it to my server. (I can only play it in VLC) The reason I mention OS .. I can map drives just fine to XP or Vista, but they changed some of the authentication encryption in Win7 and since the MVIX uses SAMBA to connect which doesn't have those encryption schemes rolled into it. There is a definate work around that you can implement in Win7 to disable the encryption so its not a complete show stopper. The MVIX player works great, but it doesn't have the prettiest menuing system out there. XBMC does have much more pizzazz!

Another media streamer I was looking at were the ones from Western Digital. They appear to have pretty good codec support and are tiny.

There are a bunch of different ways to skin that cat. I have been looking at different solutions for a while. So far I keep leaning back towards the XBMC route.

[NightrainSrt4]

There hasn't been a single format / container that I've encoded to that our Western Digital Live hasn't been able to play. The server runs elsewhere in the house with a login for the WD box giving read access to the set of folders I need (Video, Music, Pictures, etc). When the box boots up it handles all that, then a few seconds later I can just click on the server under network shares, click the folder, then play the files.

I didn't see any clarification if it had the ability to connect and stream, but the Raspberry Pi now has the support of XBMC at 1080P 40mbit/s, will only cost $35, and is just a little bigger than an Altoids tin. Wouldn't fit your purpose well if it can't stream over its lan port, and might be a bit hard to get one when they come out.

[diluzio91]

I was going to say boxee or a wd box, we have a roku and it can't access any files over the network for playback. otherwise a cheap atom, mini itx, or even an older system might be enough to take care of it.

[OvRiDe]

Another cool and fairly affordable option is the AppleTV2 (I know I know .. stay with me for a sec)

There are tons of guides on how to Jailbreak the APTV and then you can add XBMC to it. It appears to be a pretty simple process. Then you get a fairly cheap price (100 bucks), small form factor, remote, and a very stylized interface.

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I didn't see any clarification if it had the ability to connect and stream, but the Raspberry Pi now has the support of XBMC at 1080P 40mbit/s, will only cost $35, and is just a little bigger than an Altoids tin. Wouldn't fit your purpose well if it can't stream over its lan port, and might be a bit hard to get one when they come out.

I can't wait for the Raspberry Pi to come out. They are saying the first dev boards will be coming out the end of this month, but unfortunately they have pushed it back multiple times. We will just have to wait and see. Also if your looking for a more consumer level product, since the dev board will be just the board.. no power supply and might entail some soldering.. they are talking about possibly Q3 of 2012. So you might have quite a wait.

[NightrainSrt4]

I can't wait for the Raspberry Pi to come out. They are saying the first dev boards will be coming out the end of this month, but unfortunately they have pushed it back multiple times. We will just have to wait and see. Also if your looking for a more consumer level product, since the dev board will be just the board.. no power supply and might entail some soldering.. they are talking about possibly Q3 of 2012. So you might have quite a wait.

I thought they said you could give it power via the 5V micro USB? Shouldn't be hard to find a 5v 1A power supply with a micro usb connector. You could probably get away with a less powerful power supply if you use a powered USB hub for your high powered devices, or just don't use high powered devices with it. Don't a lot of phones / tablets come with 5v micro USB connectors?

[OvRiDe]

I think you are right.. I wasn't sure if the primary input for power is a single micro usb connector or if it has a separate power input and/or can be powered from a micro usb input. Either way.. they are going to be pretty cool. For the soldering they may have been just referring to the GPIO points.