Wd Tv

[krzywica]

I'll tell you what I've been doing. I bought three HP T5720 thin clients for around $100 bucks. Upgraded the RAM to 1Gig, and increased the Flash drive to 8Gig, and re-flashed XP Embedded to the new drive. I then bought the 2TB version of this and set it up as RAID 1, so 1 TB of SPACE for movies. I convert all of my movies to Divx. and stream from it very nicely..

While thin clients would be great for office apps, internet browsing, and SD media streaming. They just don't have the processing power to any software decoding at 1080p. And I would stay away from the Divx codec, it is very antiquated at this point and x264's are certainly the wave of the futrue with the advent of the .mkv container.

 

[Joeteck]

While thin clients would be great for office apps, internet browsing, and SD media streaming. They just don't have the processing power to any software decoding at 1080p. And I would stay away from the Divx codec, it is very antiquated at this point and x264's are certainly the wave of the futrue with the advent of the .mkv container.

Actually, my thin clients do streaming rather nicely, and you can add an option PCI card for extra video power if you need, which I've done. Currently neither of the devices WD TV or netflix stream 1080p. So I see no need to try to do this in your home. Divx is not antiquated, its more mature and proven than anything out there. If you are not familiar or used thin clients in this manner no need to make negative comments of a unknown domain.

 

[krzywica]

Actually, my thin clients do streaming rather nicely, and you can add an option PCI card for extra video power if you need, which I've done. Currently neither of the devices WD TV or netflix stream 1080p. So I see no need to try to do this in your home. Divx is not antiquated, its more mature and proven than anything out there. If you are not familiar or used thin clients in this manner no need to make negative comments of a unknown domain.

I'm not trying to flame you. So your thin clients will do 1080p streaming? And the WD does 1080p streaming from what I understand, you just have to buy the USB to RJ45 network dongle. I have dealt with thin clients a lot in the past and they are not very powerful as far as hardware capabilities go. They are however white handy as they are silent and have a very small form factor. I know they can stream, but can they stream high resolution content? Even if you add a GPU that is capable of decoding the HD video and taking the load off the CPU you still have to have the compatible software to run it. And if you are using a vanilla XP OS it is a pain to tweak the OS to get hardware acceleration working properly and last time I checked MPC-HC is the only player to support DXVA.

Also with Divx I am assuming you are using the .AVI container which is extremely limited. There are a lot more options when you start getting into using .MKV's.

Again I'm not trying to discount or belittle your current implementations, I'm just voicing my experiences thus far and trying to find cheaper, easier, better solutions for my centralized media playback.

 

[Joeteck]

I'm not trying to flame you. So your thin clients will do 1080p streaming? And the WD does 1080p streaming from what I understand, you just have to buy the USB to RJ45 network dongle. I have dealt with thin clients a lot in the past and they are not very powerful as far as hardware capabilities go. They are however white handy as they are silent and have a very small form factor. I know they can stream, but can they stream high resolution content? Even if you add a GPU that is capable of decoding the HD video and taking the load off the CPU you still have to have the compatible software to run it. And if you are using a vanilla XP OS it is a pain to tweak the OS to get hardware acceleration working properly and last time I checked MPC-HC is the only player to support DXVA.

Also with Divx I am assuming you are using the .AVI container which is extremely limited. There are a lot more options when you start getting into using .MKV's.

Again I'm not trying to discount or belittle your current implementations, I'm just voicing my experiences thus far and trying to find cheaper, easier, better solutions for my centralized media playback.

Thin clients have come a very long way. The three I have are all AMD 1000Ghz CPU's. Uses board mounted flash drives. It may be limited but it works for me, and I'm happy for what it offers. Streaming 1080p content is far off in the future, since it needs alot of bandwidth to achieve. Blue ray will be the only source of 1080p content, until our ISP infrastructure changes to accommodate higher demand of streaming 1080p content. And soon you'll see 1600p, which is next in line...

 

[krzywica]

Thin clients have come a very long way. The three I have are all AMD 1000Ghz CPU's. Uses board mounted flash drives. It may be limited but it works for me, and I'm happy for what it offers. Streaming 1080p content is far off in the future, since it needs alot of bandwidth to achieve. Blue ray will be the only source of 1080p content, until our ISP infrastructure changes to accommodate higher demand of streaming 1080p content. And soon you'll see 1600p, which is next in line...

We are talking about internal network HD streaming. Which is very doable for a few devices at present. I stream 1080p content wirelessly and over gigabit LAN on my internal network.

 

[Joeteck]

We are talking about internal network HD streaming. Which is very doable for a few devices at present. I stream 1080p content wirelessly and over gigabit LAN on my internal network.

Very cool.

Can you tell us how you are doing this?

 

[Nemo128]

I'll tell you what I've been doing. I bought three HP T5720 thin clients for around $100 bucks. Upgraded the RAM to 1Gig, and increased the Flash drive to 8Gig, and re-flashed XP Embedded to the new drive. I then bought the 2TB version of this and set it up as RAID 1, so 1 TB of SPACE for movies. I convert all of my movies to Divx. and stream from it very nicely..

That's a good setup. From my experience though, those won't run 1080p content with surround sound. Still, good setup for your purpose.

 

[Nemo128]

Thin clients have come a very long way. The three I have are all AMD 1000Ghz CPU's. Uses board mounted flash drives. It may be limited but it works for me, and I'm happy for what it offers. Streaming 1080p content is far off in the future, since it needs alot of bandwidth to achieve. Blue ray will be the only source of 1080p content, until our ISP infrastructure changes to accommodate higher demand of streaming 1080p content. And soon you'll see 1600p, which is next in line...

You're right Joe. 1080p is pretty undoable for cable providers. The bandwidth necessary to stream 1080p content to neighborhood nodes (for cable as an example) is much too high for any current infrastructure, or for any infrastructure currently in the works. It'll be limited to physical formats or digital distributions for download and viewing for a long time. Streaming is far off indeed.

 

[vfxcy]

Yeah, it's literally the same as the PCH. Some people even tried loading the PCH firmware onto it and it worked fine, without a couple of the internal features the PCH has.

But now we can add wired or wireless network, and they implemented PureFTPd into it. If desired, you can FTP files to an attached HDD from your PC.

Me, I want full network access to my 2TB RAID5. Finally! But, I'm still anticipating Ion nettops.

I hope people here can see this device as another cheap and easy alternative to HTPCs for media. For gaming, ha, wait till Ion.

Hi, can you point us to the the thread that showed the use of PCH firmware on the WD tV?