[Wolves] Roku & Zotac

[Kevanf1]

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 ;)


-- 
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Kevan
Linux user #373362
Staffordshire
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www.freeworld-recycling.org

'Just Free it.'
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