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On 12/02/11 21:01, Neil Stone wrote:
ok, I'm looking to have a PC in the bedroom attached to a wallmounted screen that I would like to use to watch films and listen to music.. I have given some thought to XBMC as well as MythTV.. but as I don't really have hands on, I thought I would ask the smart (m)asses of the list. So.. I want to be able to control the little bugger without having to leave the warmth of the duvet, my android devices hold potential here, but I want to be able to play 'stuff' without any real issue.. Oh, I forgot to mention one thing.. it needs to be controllable by the wife.. so as simple as possible ;-) TTFN Neil
Okay well it's been a while since I've used XBMC but if you don't want to do any recording (say just playing back videos, music, photos) then you can't go wrong with it, although you'll need some hardware that can support it.
I doesn't work too well on Intel graphics on a Celeron 3.33Ghz (which is odd considering it used to work fine on a 733Mhz XBOX with 64MB RAM and Geforce 3 graphics). I gather that with say an Atom motherboard with NVidia ION chipset you'll get decent performance as it uses OpenGL and VDPAU for HD video acceleration.
Or as you say there is MythTV. I'm personally eventually hoping to go down the MythTV route with a backend PC (probably an older P4) with a couple of USB Freeview tuners attached so it can record what the family want to watch, and then have a couple of boxes dotted around the house to play the recordings back on (well I say a couple, probably one media PC in the living room, the MythTV frontend on the kids PC and maybe XBMC on the XBOX in the bedroom playing back standard definition video).
As far as controlling it goes, I'd suggest a Windows Media Center remote. They're about £20 ish and IIRC run on radio frequency and work on Linux. Or there are more expensive fancy remotes which feature all sorts of fancy bits and bobs.
Personally I'd not be overly fussed about using a phone as a remote. I tried it on the PS3 with the Back To The Future Bluray, sure it was fun to start with (it works over wifi) but soon got tedious unlocking the screen to control the Bluray, ended up being quicker to use the PS3 controller.
Oh, and there's your third option, a PS3 Slim (the fat ones are noisy) and PS3 Media Server running on your server (it's a Java app) to transcode your video and music into a PS3 friendly format (well, actually in the case of HD video it's generally transcoding the video into a PS3 friendly container such as VOB, or in SD just transmitting it to the PS3 to play back). That's what we currently use, works reasonably well unless you happen to have some obscure format video which needs re-encoding on the fly.
Good luck, I'd be interested to know what you go for. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq