[Wolves] Roku & Zotac

[Claire]

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