I wish home theater maintenance was simple and fun for everyone.
I originally assumed (dreamed?) that home theater PCs would be something magical -- a jukebox that you just pop in a disc, it would read it, store it -- and voila! -- you'd have a new, rich multi-media experience. You could play the movie, look up the movie details, and maybe hop over to the movie's soundtrack and play it or shuffle it with related themes. Wow! I had a dream.
Now this player sounds a little like the dream I once had. However, would I need to sell my house to own it? Maybe throw in the car, boat, and RV -- pair it with a new Sony 4K TV -- and put on great Home Theater for the homeless? Wait! I'd probably have to sell the home theater set up to buy more source material.
I convinced my mother-in-law to get a Western Digital Live Player. God bless, her she's nearly 80. She gets how to switch from HDMI 6 -- satellite TV to HDMI 7 on her HD TV. She gets how to find Netflix and how to playback movies from an external hard drive I've loaned her. But why does the WD TV sometimes just display "No Signal" on a blue background. When she calls me and I tell her to pull the power cord from the box, why does this happen? Sometimes she goes to play a movie and the hard drive is unreadable. I have to go over there, unplug the hard drive, and "Scan and fix" the drive on a Windows laptop. Why does the WD TV perform an "unsafe" eject of the hard drive. She leaves it powered on and connected the the box. And those are the easy, normal every-day experiences for her. God bless her. Sometimes that box will run out of hard drive space searching for metadata -- even when the drives has gigabyte free. Sometimes audio will just drop from a movie. Now is that because of the container format -- mp4, mkv, avi, etc.? -- or is it because of the audio format -- AAC, AC3, DTS, etc. Why does one movie with AAC audio playback fine when another doesn't? Why does the same movie -- with the same player -- playback fine on my system with HDMI to a receiver and not to her TV. Yes, I've lived with an inexpensive movie player. I even have a brave 80-year old sharing that experience with me. And the support of it can only be described as "geeky". In our little player world, I can answer just about every question that crops up. But, boy wouldn't it be nice to just turn the thing on and have it play? Or is that too much to ask.
On Saturday, May 4, 2013 8:41:49 AM UTC-7, Stephen wrote:
--Oh sure! In reality I know exactly how to cobble together something that'll be mostly as good (I've been playing around with Plex for a long time and hope to do just that soon), but this just makes it so easy, pop in a blu-ray wait a little while and you have the whole thing ripped and ready to go in full quality, and having that full quality and not having to mess around with weird formats and explaining to the family and guests how to use everything... It'd just be nice.On May 4, 2013, at 3:50 AM, pj-mckay <john...@btinternet.com> wrote:Or you could look at some far cheaper Network Media player systems. You'd need to populate the system manually but most play all we want from mkv, ISO, BD Rips, DVD Rips, avi, flac, multichannel audio, everything I could ask it to. Works for me (though I don't use the eye-candy case views; prefer a simple list myself). Even if the audio might not be deemed as high end as you might want, the AV is great. Sit on the couch and browse ALL your AV.
On Friday, 3 May 2013 15:58:46 UTC+1, Stephen wrote:Wow! Looks great. Now I just need to win the lottery!
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