Media players

[TJF1960]

I am currently looking for a media player for our main tv room which will access our nas to play movies, pics and music to the tv. I am curious as to what some of you currently use and what your opinions are.

 

I am currently using the Buffalo LT-H90LAN media player but am looking for a little more. The Popcorn hour C200 looks promising but I am not sure when it will be out and if it is completely self-contained.

 

I would like a media player which is self contained and which does not require a computer running 24/7. One which can access Netflix, Amazon and some of the others as well as have a nice gui for displaying movies and music from the network attached storage.

 

I would be grateful for any thoughts or opinions.

 

Thanks,

Tim

[RatRanch]

Tim,

 

You might want to take a look at AppleTV. Out of the box it only supports media types that are playable in iTunes, however, it can be easily extended via a free third party software hack to access other sources like those you mentioned (see http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/).

 

The AppleTV device itself is very well constructed and includes HDMI and optical outputs.

 

This has been working flawlessly in my installation for several months now.

 

-Jim

[TJF1960]

Hi Jim,

 

Thanks for the info and the link. I have spent the last half hour checking into what all is involved. Seems pretty straight forward. It looks like between boxee and xbmc it will do pretty much what I am looking for. Do you have a nas you stream music and movies from, thru the apple tv? Does boxee do a pretty good job at retrieving the cover art and descriptions?

 

Thanks,

Tim

[RatRanch]

Hi Tim,

 

I don't have a dedicated NAS on my network but xmbc does a very good job of streaming media from shared folders on a Windows server. Navigating through folders is straightforward and I haven't experienced any stutters/dropouts even over a WiFi connection. I wouldn't expect a NAS to perform any differently since they typically share files the same way Windows does, i.e., via SMB. Keep in mind that AppleTv also has a built-in hard disk where you can also store media files.

 

Can't comment about retrieving cover art because I'm primarily using Boxee for streaming sources like Hulu and Netflix and using iTunes to manage saved music and movies.

 

Cheers,

-Jim