Hello guys,
I like my Oppo for Blu-Ray, DVD, SACD, and DVD-A playback; it's wonderful. However.....
I have an external hard drive that I hook up via USB to the back of my Oppo player for playing local media files (.wav, .flac, different video formats like .mpg, .mp4, .avi, etc) and I've got my files organized on my hard drive, like a folder for movies, and another folder for all my digital music called "My CD Collection", with sub folders for artist, sub folders within that for each album, you get the idea.
Trouble is, Oppo's interface for playing back files is, IMO, clunky. It's slow to select Music from the home menu, select my external hard drive (which I've called the Oppo Vault, very clever I know), then my "My CD Collection" folder, then the Artist, then the particular album, hit the down arrows 'till I've selected the track I want to play, and press play. There's no ability to save playlists for future use, and it's tedious and cumbersome to create the playlists in the first place.
Then let's say I want to watch a video file now. I can't just back out of the My Cd Collection folder and select the movie folder and start playing video files. No....Oppo makes me back all the way up to the home screen, select the Movie icon, and then remote-mash my way back into the movies folder, hit the down arrow numerous times until I've navigated to the video file I want, and play from there. Sometimes the Oppo freezes up, too, when trying to click into a directory a couple of folders deep (Yes, I've talked with Oppo support about this, even sent in the unit once, didn't help, tired of fighting it).
I plan on keeping the Oppo, but there's gotta be an easier way to play back my local media files through HDMI, but I've never really looked into it and figured this was the perfect place to ask. Here's my must-haves:
-playback of .wav files, high-resolution .flac files, and various video formats (basically play anything the Oppo can play), which includes 5.1 audio playback on video files, as I have some movie files with a 5.1 track.
-fast transfer of LOCAL storage from my external hard drive to the media device; I don't want to stream anything. I've got my files all there on the hard drive, no need to use up bandwidth on my wifi connection and dealing with buffering/streaming issues when I've got the files right there on my hard drive. No network, no server, no internet connection will be used by me.
-USB 3.0 would be a plus, as my Oppo's ESATA connection is finicky and Oppo's USB ports are 2.0 and I would have no problem getting a new external hard drive that has USB 3.0 to take advantage of it
-Whisper quiet operation
-Nice, easy interface I can use with either a remote or keyboard for media playback. I don't necessarily want to deal with a Windows or Mac interface, but rather a cleaner interface tailored just for media playback.
-Ability to save playlists
-I won't be using any analog connections for this; strictly HDMI only.
What would do the trick for this? A Raspberry Pi, or something else? I'm kind of in the dark with this. Any help would be appreciated. I've done some research on this, but seem to only come up with devices that only talk about streaming.
