secondary htpc

U

uninja

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 24, 2006
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I have a primary HTPC in the living room that I have XBMC loaded on top of Windows 7 which I control with an iPad. This HTPC has a wired connection to another Win7 box upstairs loaded with movies/tv.

I bought a Sony wifi enabled bluray player for the bedroom but I find using serviio hit or miss on playing movies/tv so I quit using it 6 mo+ ago. They've updated since then so maybe it's better now.

At this point I don't really care about netflix, etc. just playing ripped movies/tv.

Any suggestions? Building a small HTPC and use XBMCbuntu as the o/s (or some other o/s)? Some kind of roku/wd box? it'd need to stream via wireless N so I'm not expecting to do 1080p.
 
my good friend just bought a Roku 2 for his father. He said that while it would do the job, it wasn't nearly as responsive as a full blown i3 htpc.
 
if all you care about is playing your ripped movies I would look into the Pivos Xios for something small form factor that you can load XBMC on it. It is sponsored by XBMC so they have optimized builds for this hardware. Even comes with a remote.
 
morgwon said:
if all you care about is playing your ripped movies I would look into the Pivos Xios for something small form factor that you can load XBMC on it. It is sponsored by XBMC so they have optimized builds for this hardware. Even comes with a remote.
Click to expand...

That seems like a decent idea. It looks like you can flash the firmware on it to just run XBMC/linux instead of XBMC on top of Android to give better performance if Android apps aren't desirable.

The main negative I saw was spotty wifi performance but it looks like there's a DIY fix for re-positioning the antenna.
 
You can also sync multiple xbmc devices over the network via. mysql. It's pretty slick and lets you do things like resume playback on another device.
 
Interesting, only concern I would have with a device such as the xios is a) does it play 1080p movie files smoothly and b) does the 10/100 interface limit what you can stream to the device?

I can't seem to find any articles that use XBMC and describe actual playback performance.
 
The 10/100 interface may be limiting if there is limited buffering. I have seen bandwidth rates up to 150Mbs when streaming a 1080p movie.

Playing files smoothly is nice, but you also want smooth fast-forward & rewind capabilities. It's not fun if you get super choppy playback when you want to fast-forward, rewind or scene selection.
 
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