[Wolves] Roku & Zotac

Tue May 13 14:03:20 UTC 2014

Oh good grief!!!  I wanted to try openELEC on this PC (HP Pavilion
7916) but guess what?  It doesn't support USB booting.  Ok, no
problem, try the Plop boot manager...  Huh!  That can't get it booting
either and this is with two different USB sticks that do boot other
hardware.  So it looks like going back to Puppy or throwing the damn
thing over the neighbours fence :)

On 13 May 2014 11:12, Kevanf1 <kevanf1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
> **********************************************
> www.freeworld-recycling.org
>
> 'Just Free it.'
> **********************************************

-- 
==============================================

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

'Just Free it.'
**********************************************