How to stream from PC to TVs in the house?

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shawnoen

[H]ard|Gawd
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Apr 21, 2009
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Excuse me lack of knowledge but I have to think there is an easy way to accomplish what I want.

We have a wireless network in our house already. My desktop PC is hardwired to the router. We have two TVs, one is connected wirelessly via a PS3, the other via a Sony bluray player.

Is there a way to play movies that are on my desktop PC and watch them on either TV?

Can I do this with a Chromecast?
 
That may work, or look into the combination of a Roku box (2XD's are CHEAP) and Plex Server running on your Desktop.
 
Look into something called DLNA. You need to setup a server (on the PC) then on the TVs you will see the "feed". I did it before I setup a HTPC. I used a program called mediatomb, but there's others out there too.

Downside of DLNA is it's codec dependent. The TV has to support each codec. Though some programs will convert on the fly before sending to the TV.
 
Chromecast doesn't support network streaming in this way.

What TV do you have, what BluRay player model do you have (specifically)? If you have either a smart TV or smart Bluray player, and they support DLNA, all you need to do is ensure your video library in your PC is shared on your network and that the video files are in the supported format for either the TV or BluRay. I don't know much about PS3 media sharing (never used one), but I'm sure it has streaming capabilities too.

EDIT--I would discourage going Plex. Its upside is the server will real-time convert files. Down-side is the host machine needs to support it (not usually an issue), and Plex itself is a very buggy platform--hit-and-miss IMHO, and I never had much luck with it.
 
If you don't mind adding another device, XBMC on a Rasbperry Pi works excellently.
 
Thanks for the info. Gives me something to research and hopefully figure out a solution!
 
wizdum said:
If you don't mind adding another device, XBMC on a Rasbperry Pi works excellently.
Click to expand...

Yeah I just got this setup recently and works nice. You may have to tweak NFS though, I did, as with default settings it was choppy. But other than that it works great. The power usage is so low I just leave it on.
 
I just swapped my wd TV boxes to roku and went plex. This has been working ok so far.

I was using the wdtv boxes to play from network shares. They were running b-rad firmware. I have them still if you want to buy one.
 
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sc0tty8 said:
I just swapped my wd TV boxes to roku and went plex. This has been working ok so far.
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Exact same here. The Roku 3s are waaaaaaay faster than the WDTVs. So far I'm impressed. I converted all my MKVs to MP4 so that the server doesn't need to transcode. (If it does, it's a beefy VM, 2x4 core Xeons.)
 
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/usr/home said:
Exact same here. The Roku 3s are waaaaaaay faster than the WDTVs. So far I'm impressed. I converted all my MKVs to MP3 so that the server doesn't need to transcode. (If it does, it's a beefy VM, 2x4 core Xeons.)
Click to expand...



Server is 16 core and 24gb ram. I'd like to have it run on oi but not that far yet. That box is even more beef:)
 
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