[Wolves] Roku & Zotac

Tue May 13 10:13:15 UTC 2014

My eyes have been well and truly opened as to the possibilities :)  It
may sound odd but I had not heard about DNLA until very recently and
even then I hadn't got a clue what it was.  Until I read up on it
properly last night.  I found a rather amusing post on a forum stating
that DNLA was now extinct.  This was back in 2012 that it was written.
 Somehow I don't think it is quite extinct now :)

Anyway, I've looked a bit more closely at openELEC.  It may just be
what I am looking for.  I did find a 'pet' file that will install
MiniDNLA onto Puppy but I'll try the openELEC first as it is a
dedicated media server distro.  The one annoyance is that there is not
a CD iso for installation.  This PC I want to use will not boot from a
USB stick/drive so it's a case of try the Plop boot manager.  I cannot
get on with Smart Boot Manager, never have so I hope this works..

I may well still get a Raspberry Pi at some future point but it will
be solely as a media server as I have zero interest in programming
with it or any of the other stuff.

On 12 May 2014 22:17, Claire Robinson <lug at sitesearcher.co.uk> wrote:
> On 12/05/14 17:50, Kevanf1 wrote:
>> On 12 May 2014 15:03, Claire <lug at sitesearcher.co.uk> wrote:
>>> On 12/05/14 11:56, Kevanf1 wrote:
>>>> On 12 May 2014 11:45, John Rose <john.aaron.rose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Kevan,
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for the info. I don't want to use Plex or other web-based app as I
>>>>> don't want to give access to my PCs to any external organisation and because
>>>>> I don't want to buy a device which is accessible externally. Also, I'm quite
>>>>> happy to use our laptop to stream to a box connected to my TV). I decided to
>>>>> take a risk and buy a cheap Zotac Stream Box. I hope that it works with
>>>>> Universal Media Server (my preference) / minidlna (Canonical say that they
>>>>> have committed a fix to put minidlna back into Trusty's repos) and my Sony
>>>>> non-smart TV. I'll let you know how I get on.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Ah, I'm assuming then, that 'minidlna' is a lightweight media server?
>>>> I honestly had not heard of any of these prior to you mentioning them
>>>> and I am very interested in giving them a go.  My goal is to use as
>>>> light a weight distro as possible on an old machine to give decent
>>>> performance (streaming wise) on the tv.  I don't have a smart tv as I
>>>> had to buy this present one just
>>>>  before they came out :(  It was a case of buy a tv or go without
>>>> until they came down in price...  This was a bargain at the time at
>>>> £900 for a 42" plasma.  I have had it for about 4 or 5 years now.
>>>>
>>>> Anyway, back to the experiments.  I'm thinking of trying a bare bones
>>>> install of Debian, adding a lightweight GUI and nothing else apart
>>>> from a media server and its dependencies (I found I needed the avahi
>>>> daemon to run Plex on Lubuntu because I'm not grabbing it from a
>>>> repository).  I'm certainly finally starting to learn more about Linux
>>>> by doing this after all these years :)  I'm ashamed to admit that even
>>>> though I first installed and used Linux back in 1997 (Corel Linux
>>>> anybody?) I still shy away from the CLI and do not know even a tiny
>>>> amount of what I should.  I'll get there..
>>>>
>>>
>>> If all you want is a cheap media server I'd recommend considering xbmc
>>> on the raspberry pi. It's not so good for iplayer etc but in place of a
>>> dlna server/rendered it is cheap, low powered, always on, usually no
>>> format conversion necessary and can directly play your files in full HD
>>> using NFS, SMB or even attached USB storage.
>>>
>>> Alternately if you have something more powerful lying around you could
>>> use it instead and have a full htpc instead. There are various front
>>> ends and back ends to do so, xbmc, mythtv, tvheadend, vdr etc.
>>>
>>> When looking at dlna be aware that the device you to connect to your
>>> telly (media renderer) may only support certain specific formats and
>>> on-the-fly conversion may be necessary on the server, which is a heavy
>>> duty task.
>>>
>>> Claire
>>>
>>
>> I was waiting for somebody to suggest using a Raspberry Pi :)  You may
>> gather from that that yes, I have indeed thought about it.  Yes, I
>> have been very tempted to do just this.  It's a future
>> consideration....  At the moment I happen to have a couple of old PCs
>> knocking about gathering dust.  I used to have them up and running in
>> my workshop but then I had a reconfigure and shuffle around to make
>> room for a lathe.  So they got powered down and left... and left....
>> until now.  It's very much a case of can I use these still for real
>> useful stuff.  Those who know me well will know that I hate to throw
>> anything out if it possibly has some life left in it.  It also means I
>> hate to spend money if I have something already that will do the job
>> :)
>>
>> As it happens, I may have been sidetracked by my own obsession with
>> Plex.  I found out today that MiniDNLA, apparently now known as
>> ReadyMedia, is available in the Puppy repo's.  Now things are really
>> starting to get interesting.  I happened to try Lucid Puppy 528 only a
>> few weeks ago.  It runs very nicely on this particular old desktop,
>> especially since I transplanted some old RAM and took it to the heady
>> heights of 512mb :D  woohoo, steady on now!!!
>>
>> File formats are thankfully not a problem :)  I tend to stick to avi,
>> mp4 or mkv which my ROKU LT handles fine.  If I do happen upon
>> anything different I can always change it to a more friendly format on
>> my main laptop.
>>
>> I may return to the Pi.. watch this space ;)
>>
>>
>
> I used to run mediatomb (no longer maintained) then moved to
> ps3mediaserver (a cousin of UMS) on a headless 2.8 celeron with 512mb
> RAM and it would run quite happily but wasn't up to on-the-fly transcoding.
>
> You can do cool things like this with raspberry pi and xbmc
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q3uIDneVIA
>
> Claire
>
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Kevan
Linux user #373362
Staffordshire
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