RE: best HD media player to replace xbmc

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf
> Of Wayne
> Sent: 20 September 2008 22:10
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ukha_d] best HD media player to replace xbmc
>
> What's your overall impression of the Mac Mini's now? I guess you have
> Plex on it or have you gone native ?

As our esteemed leader will tell you I have been a "fanboi" (OK -
not
*QUITE* that evangelical maybe) of Macs for a while ... as in I used a G4
Mac Mini (that I still have) as my media server for several years as it was
obscenely stable and hooked up to a perversely large stack of external
firewire drives (26 at last count). I have a photo of how it was set up in
my old house somewhere and it just looks insane perched on top of a trio of
comparatively huge 8 bay 5.25" cases ... anyway, I digress.

The "new" one that I bought the other weekend was bought solely
to run Plex
on - I've been trying stuff like Meedio, My Movies on MCE, MythTV, Media
Portal and God knows how many others for ages and I guess Plex has
impressed
me more than any of those others so that's a good start.

So far every time I've turned on the TV and gone to watch a movie using it
it has still been working and hasn't been locked up or has crashed so
that's
also a good sign ... I've had issues with it not automatically scraping my
movies collection for movie info (but hopefully that's fixed in the new
version), it takes a ridiculous amount of time (30 - 60 seconds or so) to
start playing a movie from my network (a common problem) but they're
working
on that too. I haven't tried using it for playing back music because - well
- lets just say that I have better tools for that job so I just haven't
turned on that menu option.

The actual user interface to Plex is a bit of a mixed bag - it *LOOKS*
stunning - especially at native res on a good widescreen panel but some of
the navigation and controls I do still find a bit quirky but you can
control
it from the little Apple remote and that's only effectively a six button
remote.

For TV timeshifting there really is no functionality at all at the moment -
I'm really hoping for them to implement some sort of client-server model on
this one in the same way that they have with MythTV in that you have a
central machine with DVB-T or DVB-S tuners in it and all the remote
machines
just set up recording schedules on it and they can all access its
recordings
- if that happens I'll be over the moon, if it doesn't then it simply gets
used as a network DVD player.

> And what are you using for the HD content? (or have you got a blu-ray
> player for it?)

I have HD-DVD and Blu-Ray ripping tools and some rips on my network but I
haven't yet tried getting Plex to play them...

> We've been bitten with the Mac bug at the office and I've been toying
> with getting one for the house but I'm holding out for (hopefully) one
> with a Blu-Ray player in it.

I'll be surprised if the Mini gets a Blu-Ray drive in it for a while - the
slot loaders in particular are still very expensive compared to the slot
loading DVD-ROM and DVD-RW drives and the Mac Mini is a "cheap"
Mac...

Phil


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