Time to migrate MythTV away from the lounge room?
On slashhdot: Video Appliance For a Large Library On a Network?
For the past year or so I have been trying (and failing) to figure out a reasonable solution for bringing my large media library to my living room. All of my media lives on an Ubuntu server that sits on my network. It’s been very reliable and it’s fast enough for streaming purposes. My content is exposed via SMB. It’s the living room side where I keep running into problems. I am currently using Windows 7 and XBMC, but the case is too big and noisy, I don’t particularly care for Windows, and the whole thing just seems overkill. What I want is a device that can present a decent UI that the non-Slashdot crowd would be able to use, but that is still powerful enough to stream full-fidelity 1080p. I dream of a small box that can transcode video over a network, but that’s probably a pipe dream. The new Apple TV would be great if it could connect to network shares. What say you, Slashdot? Is what I’m looking for possible, or should I just give in to the iTunes/Amazon/whatever juggernauts?
Indeed with so many choices and trade-offs, it’s no wonder I still havn’t gotten around to solving this.
Observations of our changing TV viewing habits with MythTV:
- With high-definition free-to-air, the more disk space the better. 500GB is not enough.
- Little interest in paying for Cable TV.
- Rarely watch live TV anymore.
- Radio station streaming is a must-have in every room.
- Noisy computer in the lounge room is undesirable.
- Skipping past all the DVD junk is a must-have. No previews, no FBI warnings, no ads. Life is too short.
- Configuring and maintaining MythTV can be a time consuming prospect.
- Still want NetFlix for MythTV
