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On 06/11/2009 09:04, tom wrote:
Go back to the original unix philosophy: Do one thing and do it well.Haven't got that many pockets. I must admit I misread what this machine is:"For less than £60, the Hisense is an effective way of getting your digital media files onto you telly without having to hook up your PC" except you have to have a PC to connect it to to get the media - and I may as well have the PC* to do the displaying anyway so its a redundant box already.
It's not redundant when you have kids who want to watch something.For instance, at the moment my other half's PC is attached to the TV as a second monitor. At the moment when the kids want to watch something when my other half is on the PC they either have to wait until she's finished or she gets booted off on to her laptop. Basically it's due to the fact she spends some time playing those annoying Flash games on Facebook which the sounds will go over whatever media is playing.
One of these boxes would be ideal for me as it means I then don't have to have the PC on and logged in just so the kids can watch something. The box will accept USB sticks and USB hard drives so I can copy content to a USB hard drive and have done with it, or as it's networked I can then get it to connect to the server to grab content (my server is on all the time anyway regardless of if any desktops or my laptop is on).
I'd have happily used my XBOX 360 for my media needs but first of all it's stupidly noisy (which is really annoying, so much as so if it wasn't for the warranty on the thing and the risk of it dying from that red ring of death, I would have taken it apart and replaced the fans). Plus Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have gone out of their way to push their Windows Media formats. The XBOX 360 won't play MKV video files (HD stuff basically), or AVI files (as far as I know). It is possible to transcode video on the fly so it'll stream to the XBOX but then you need a reasonable spec PC to do that. The other option is to get it to connect to a PC running Windows Media Center (again, needs a Windows PC) or you can use Windows Media files (which I tend to avoid).
So yeah, basically one of these boxes is perfect for me, in fact I'm probably going to advise my dad to get one too as he tends to want to watch XVID/DIVX video files but his PC is no where near his TV and his DVD recorder won't play them.
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html