HTPC/Streaming Media Box

[WHEswim]

When you say Aeon was too cumbersome, do you mean that it was too many menus to get to what you are looking for? Or was it something as far as being too hard to tweak everything just right? Since I haven't used it yet, I wasn't quite sure what you were saying. Hopefully I can get started on all of this fairly soon. I really wish I had known about all of this sooner, ha.

 

[Grador]

I'm not sure cumbersome is quite the right word for it. I haven't used it in a while but if I remember correctly the UI is heavily biased to using thumbnails for movie selection and I prefer lists. Specifics aside, I just didn't like the way it was structured somehow.

Installing a skin takes about 2 min, there is really no reason not to try all of them.

 

[g0bez]

Well, so far XBMCbuntu is pretty great! Installation was dead simple... I ran into a couple of video card issues, which I had anticipated since every Linux install I've done with this card has had the same issue. I was able to manually install the proper driver and presto-changeo, perfect video.

I still need to do some tweaking to the audio... but it is working *well enough* for now that I'll put it off until I get a few more things taken care of.

I'm so strongly acclimated to CentOS that I find myself running those commands instead of Ubuntu... nothing that a bit of time won't fix (or perhaps some bash aliases to call apt-get from 'yum')


I have a Software Raid-1 array of my two new 2TB drives, and my original stand-alone 2TB drive mounted to the filesystem... my next tasks:

=> Set up the necessary network shares so that all of my home computers can access these for read/write
=> Set up XBMC to use these as video/audio/picture sources
=> Look in to BluRay playback from Disk, ideally from XBMC (I'm considering buying a BR drive for my HTPC, instead of a standalone BR player)
=> Possibly add DLNA streaming to have the option of skipping XBMC if I don't want to drop into that interface.


Now I just need to figure out what all XBMC can do. From what I've read of other posts around the internet, I feel like I'm using a Ferrari to run Sunday errands around town in 25 mph zones.

 

[Grador]

UPNP is DLNA so that's already built into xbmc. I you're going to be completely out of luck on disk playback as to my knowledge there is no way to get xbmc to play encrypted content. I encourage you to do a little research yourself on this as I have had no reason to. I only play ripped files, specifically I rip only the main movie, no menus.

 

[g0bez]

Thanks for the heads-up. I am aware of the disk playback limitations -- haven't done much checking into it yet though.

I have briefly reviewed MakeMKV but I'm not sure if that will be worth the hassle/cost. I certainly don't mind (And probably even prefer) to just rip them to file... it makes management a *heck* of a lot easier. My goal here is to get as much into one source (my HTPC) as possible, so ripping on another PC and copying to this disk is a bit more cumbersome than I hoped, but is certainly an option.

Audio playback is resolved, and sounds *amazing* now. It took a bit of cli magic to get audio out moved to HDMI... it is really nice to have such a broad user base. At this point, pretty much any issue you have on XBMC has likely already been addressed with some sort of well-documented workaround (unless you're using some sort of really unique hardware).

 

[Grador]

I use the free version of dvdfab myself, it usually works pretty well.