Topic: Help with home theater network

[skotdee]

Hopefully this is the right forum for this, thought about posting in the photo/video forum also... anyway, Im moving into a new home soon thats fully wired with CAT5 for a home network. Im wondering how to go about playing media, specifically video, from my networked computer/hard drives to my home theater.

Is anyone here doing anything similar? I know I can use a system like sonos, squeezebox, or even my PS3 to play flac & mp3 audio files over the network, and video files like avi or mp4 for that matter, but how are folks playing authored files in a VIDEO_TS folder, ie: shows downloaded here, or that I've authored myself, over the network? Is this possible or do I need to convert the VOB files to one file thats compatible with the PS3?

Any recommendations?

[OFOTD]

Sorry for a short answer as I can elaborate further later but.......

XBMC is your answer.

I use it not only in my home theater room but also on separate TV's throughout my house.   Cheapest hardware that runs it is the AppleTV2.  You must jailbreak it but from the time I walked in my house with a new ATV2 last weekend to the time I jailbroke it and was hooking it up to my TV with XBMC installed on it was 12 minutes.  That quick and that easy.

XBMC will play ALL of you video and audio content.  FLAC, 24 bit, mkv, mp4, VOB's, you name it and it'll play it. 

Did I mention is FREE as well?

http://xbmc.org/

[taperj]

Another simple option is boxee, buy one or build one. Free to build your own:

http://www.boxee.tv/

And one other option I've been using for years is MythTV, also free and has done fine by me in most regards:

http://www.mythtv.org/

OFOTD: XBMC looks nice, does it support BluRay playback? Doesn't seem to mention it on their site(although I see some mention of hacking it to do so).

J

[OFOTD]

OFOTD: XBMC looks nice, does it support BluRay playback? Doesn't seem to mention it on their site(although I see some mention of hacking it to do so).

Currently it does not natively play BluRay discs.   Here is a link explaining how to do it though:  http://lifehacker.com/#!5621471/how-to-enable-blu+ray-playback-in-xbmc

Quite honestly I think its the only thing XBMC doesn't play out of the box.

The Boxee is a really nice appliance.  I think hardware aside that XBMC blows it out of the water though.   Too much 3rd Party and open source work done for XBMC.   Also an infinitely more customizable platform than Boxee, GoogleTV or ATV2.

[spyder9]

J. River Media Center. 

Best $50.00 I ever spent on AV.


http://www.jriver.com/index.html