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Ixian posted:Because I own both (gen 1 Fire TV and two Shields) and I think the Shield is better. In the end it's faster for what I like to do with Kodi and other apps. And if you have a good 4k TV there's an even bigger delta between them. Whatever the case, it's a simple difference of opinion, not a binary choice. Personally I think your stance of popping in to every one of these discussions and essentially saying there's no reason at all to get a Shield, buy a Fire TV, is "goofy" but that gets in to the whole difference of opinion aspect. Don't pull a bitch move like that. I've never said that there's no reason to buy a Shield (in every one of my post, I say that it's great hardware) or that the Fire TV is the best solution all of time forever. The guy already owns a NUC and he's looking for a way to access apps. Suggesting a $200 piece of hardware when a $40-99 piece of equipment can do the same job is pretty goofy IMO. The Shield's a main box. Not something you get to augment a main box. (the only reason I even brought up the big Fire TV was because he mentioned wanting to use a FLIRC, which is impossible on the stick)
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Jan 11, 2016 05:10
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Call Me Charlie posted:Don't pull a bitch move like that. I've never said that there's no reason to buy a Shield (in every one of my post, I say that it's great hardware) or that the Fire TV is the best solution all of time forever. The guy already owns a NUC and he's looking for a way to access apps. Suggesting a $200 piece of hardware when a $40-99 piece of equipment can do the same job is pretty goofy IMO. The Shield's a main box. Not something you get to augment a main box. (the only reason I even brought up the big Fire TV was because he mentioned wanting to use a FLIRC, which is impossible on the stick) You should probably take a breather and maybe - just a suggestion - not take this so personally  I won't, promise. Hugs and kisses buddy.
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Jan 11, 2016 05:16
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Ixian posted:NFS on Windows is better than it used to be but you aren't going to see any magical improvement from it. Also, it's still not very good. Combination of three things - I expected that with hardware decoding, the Pi 2 itself could keep up with h.264 as long as it could stream quick enough, my first round of Googling found many references to SMB/CIFS being a bottleneck, and a decent free Windows implementation would be an easy thing to try out. If there's no decent free Windows NFS server, then I'll dig deeper.
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Jan 11, 2016 05:30
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Ixian posted:I generally don't have an issue with PQ on the Shield - it's not obviously bad, and you can and should calibrate it with your TV anyway - but it's worth mentioning. I thought this wouldn't be a big deal but yeesh, I looked up some examples on the forums and yeah for $300 CDN I want something that at least gets the basics right. When are they fixing that?
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Jan 11, 2016 16:05
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The Gunslinger posted:I thought this wouldn't be a big deal but yeesh, I looked up some examples on the forums and yeah for $300 CDN I want something that at least gets the basics right. When are they fixing that? Are you able to link to the examples you saw? PQ would be huge deal breaker for me in considering picking one up. Since it seems like Nvidia is actively supporting the device to fix issues that its user base is reporting, I may just pick up a Shield down the line anyway and relegate it to a bedroom TV, and stick with my NUC for my main room and take Call Me Charlie's advice and pick up a cheap device like a Fire TV stick or Roku or whatever to get streaming apps. Thanks all for your help.
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Jan 11, 2016 20:03
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If I want a small device to hide behind a wall mounted TV that can do kodi and Netflix with the easiest user interface so even grandma can use it, what is the best current option? Looking at Chromecast, fire TV stick or raspberry pi 2.
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Jan 12, 2016 16:25
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The Fire TV Stick is probably your best bet. The Raspberry Pi will require a lot more effort for not really much more utility for what you want. Chromecast is an awful idea since it requires a phone or tablet to do anything with.
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Jan 12, 2016 16:48
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Endless Mike posted:The Fire TV Stick is probably your best bet. The Raspberry Pi will require a lot more effort for not really much more utility for what you want. Chromecast is an awful idea since it requires a phone or tablet to do anything with. I personally like the Chromecast way more than my Fire TV stick. It has a lot more utility. True you have to have a phone or tablet, but I personally always have my phone with me and have misplaced the Fire TV stick reboot more times than I care to count.
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Jan 12, 2016 16:50
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Medullah posted:I personally like the Chromecast way more than my Fire TV stick. It has a lot more utility. True you have to have a phone or tablet, but I personally always have my phone with me and have misplaced the Fire TV stick reboot more times than I care to count. Sure but does "grandma" have a phone or tablet on them all the time?
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Jan 12, 2016 17:19
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Endless Mike posted:Sure but does "grandma" have a phone or tablet on them all the time? Yeah, true.
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Jan 12, 2016 17:23
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Endless Mike posted:Sure but does "grandma" have a phone or tablet on them all the time? Yea but she still makes my wife email her pictures from Facebook. Sounds like the fire stick is the way to go, thanks.
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Jan 12, 2016 17:25
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My mother in law got a Chromecast after someone recommended it to her at I think Target and she's had an awful time with it for the same reasons my wife (who has the tech skills and taste of a typical grandma) has problems - they do not think of using a phone or tablet as a remote at all. They are very, very tied habitually to remote controls with physical buttons, in fact. It may be better to try a Roku not just for the interface style but because the headphones output option is good for seniors with hearing problems since many hearing aids support Bluetooth or sometimes 1.5mm jacks.
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Jan 12, 2016 18:23
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Bigass Moth posted:Yea but she still makes my wife email her pictures from Facebook. For 20 you can buy a mount for the regular FireTV that lets you put it behind a TV easily. Does a good job (don't buy the cheaper knock offs for $6) I'd pick that over the other options you mentioned. The remote is WiFi so no line of sight issues.
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Jan 12, 2016 23:49
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Bigass Moth posted:If I want a small device to hide behind a wall mounted TV that can do kodi and Netflix with the easiest user interface so even grandma can use it, what is the best current option? Fire TV Stick, but if you don't use Amazon services, you can set Firestarter to default the home button to it's launcher menu which will make things a little simpler for the tech challenged. The menu is just a list of apps installed. If you need Amazon services, you can set Firestarter to open Kodi when you double tap the home button. That way the box behaves like normal except when you need to get into Kodi. That's a little more difficult for people to grasp since you're jumping around UIs but it's not that difficult to grasp if you explain it to them. You can also link to Android apps within Kodi (so the only time they need to bounce back to the default UI is when they want to use Amazon's crap) Raspberry Pi 2 would be fine for just Kodi if that's all you need. necrobobsledder posted:My mother in law got a Chromecast after someone recommended it to her at I think Target and she's had an awful time with it for the same reasons my wife (who has the tech skills and taste of a typical grandma) has problems - they do not think of using a phone or tablet as a remote at all. They are very, very tied habitually to remote controls with physical buttons, in fact. It may be better to try a Roku not just for the interface style but because the headphones output option is good for seniors with hearing problems since many hearing aids support Bluetooth or sometimes 1.5mm jacks. Yeah, Roku would be the best choice if you only need the apps or don't mind a horrible interface when access kodi local media through upnp. It's foolproof. Call Me Charlie fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Jan 12, 2016 |
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Jan 12, 2016 23:52
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Hey guys, I'm finally starting to build a new HTPC/home server and I'm trying to find ways to keep it as quiet as possible. I've decided on a mini-ITX Skylake i5 system (no dedicated GPU) with a Seasonic fanless ATX power supply (already ordered), and so plan to spend a bit more cash on it. The PC will be sitting below my TV in my living room and I don't want to notice the noise from it while walking around the room or sitting 4 feet from it. My question is -- which case would you guys recommend? I've been looking at the Fractal Design Node 304 and Core 500 and they both look decent. I'm going to put a Hyper 212 Evo cooler on the processor to keep it both cool and quiet (it has PWM fans so it should be really quiet), but I don't know anything about the quality of the cases and the fans that come with them. I live in Europe so case availability might be a problem, but I really want to know if some sort of ideal solution exists.
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Jan 29, 2016 10:14
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I'm having a Super Bowl party. I don't have cable. I get the local channel the Super Bowl will be on just fine, but it would be cool to have some DVR capabilities during the game. I expect that people will watch the game in my family room and living room. I have a Windows PC (old Core 2 Duo laptops) attached to each of the TVs with wired ethernet. I have an i5-6600 Windows desktop and an i5-750 Linux machine in my basement, connected to the same network. Is there some inexpensive piece of hardware I can connect to one of these machines (preferably the Linux one) that will allow me to receive the local broadcast over the air and "serve" it to my Windows laptops with some kind of pause and rewind capabilities? Perhaps this: http://www.amazon.com/Kworld-Tuner-Tuners-Capture-UB435-Q/dp/B001LQEEEA/ref=sr_1_4?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1454095424&sr=1-4&keywords=atsc+tuner If this is possible, it would also allow me to watch OTA TV with my sound bar, which I can't do right now. My TV's digital audio out only works with HDMI inputs.
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Jan 29, 2016 19:24
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HDHomeRuns would be the ideal thing for this, but they might be pricier than you’re looking for...and having not looked at their lineup in years I’m not sure which to recommend here. Looks like you might be able to get one cheaply on eBay though. Anyway they hook up to your antenna and output the digital stream over the network, I think at minimum they have two tuners, so it'd work out for you. Windows Media Center (included in 7...but not updated and costs money in later versions) supports them and does all that fancy DVR stuff, so you can set it up on each machine to use one of the tuners. (I think newer ones can do more flexible streaming but I’m not too familiar with them, and there’s some new software they’re testing but it’s still beta and buggy AFAIK) Otherwise those cheap USB tuners would work (Windows MC again), but I think you’d have to put one on each machine. If you happen to have an Xbox 360 you can use it as a Media Center Extender, and stream from one of the machines instead of needing two tuners.
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Jan 30, 2016 00:32
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To expand a bit: Windows Media Center is free on Windows 7, $10 on Windows 8.1, and not supported at all on Windows 10. I'm on their bete channel and it's pretty stable but missing features: no rewind/FF/pause on live TV I don't think. I only have one TV, but I'm fairly sure that if you're setting all TVs to the same channel, it only needs one tuner. It looks like it supports everything with MythTV, so you could theoretically set that up on the Linux box, and serve it to clients on the Windows machines.
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Jan 30, 2016 00:59
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Endless Mike posted:To expand a bit: Windows Media Center is free on Windows 7, $10 on Windows 8.1, and not supported at all on Windows 10. I'm on their bete channel and it's pretty stable but missing features: no rewind/FF/pause on live TV I don't think. I only have one TV, but I'm fairly sure that if you're setting all TVs to the same channel, it only needs one tuner. It looks like it supports everything with MythTV, so you could theoretically set that up on the Linux box, and serve it to clients on the Windows machines. WMC is no longer available. The only way you can get it anymore is via a Windows 7 install that supports it (Pro, Ultimate). You can't buy the Windows 8 version, they stopped that last October. There are hacks/workaround for new installs of 8 and even for 10 but they are pretty lovely. Which is too bad because for Live TV at least WMC was (and is, it still works for those that have it) really good. Even though they switched to Rovi for guide data last summer, which is subpar at best. Easiest,best way for simple live TV these days is an antenna, a HDHomerun (I usally recommend the Extend, since it has hardware encoding, but the lower model works if your client/network is good enough). Use the HDHR app - it is pretty basic, even the beta, but if you just want to watch and maybe pause live channels it'll get the job done.
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Jan 30, 2016 01:06
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Anyone else have any experience with Windows Storage Spaces on Windows 10? I don't have any questions, just want to warn that it's complete poo poo in unexpected ways. I started out with four 3TB hard drives in a pool, it wants you to tell it how bit to make the virtual pool for adding future drives, 15TB seems to be the max limit for some reason so I set it at that. Then all of windows reports the virtual drive as 15TB despite my physicals drives not actually adding up to that, which creates a scenario where checking my percentage usage is incorrect and I filled the drives up before thinking things through. Whatever you set the max virtual space to, you can never change it to a lower number, even if it is still higher than your physical space. So getting pissed about the misrepresentation, I planned on trying DrivePool to do the same thing. Storage Spaces won't let you just migrate the drives back to normal drives unless they get reformatted or you have enough empty physical space on the virtual drive so that it can move everything off of a drive on to the others and shut that drive down, which I didn't have. So I installed two more 3TB drives to start shuffling poo poo off of the virtual drive till I had enough space to shut a drive down, remove it from Storage Spaces and add it to DrivePool so I could shuffle enough off for the next drive and so on. Incidentally File Manager reports a certain amount of data on the Storage Space, but the Storage Space Manager reports that I'm using a couple TB more that there really is, so once the new drives are filled, it doesn't think I have enough space offloaded to shuffle between the remaining to shut a drive down. So now I'm adding a third drive to offload more data. TLDR: Just use DrivePool from the start it's better in every way and dead loving simple. I'm sure some of you more knowledgeable than me are having a laugh at my pain.
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Feb 9, 2016 20:10
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redhalo posted:Anyone else have any experience with Windows Storage Spaces on Windows 10? I don't have any questions, just want to warn that it's complete poo poo in unexpected ways. ...you had 12tb of drives, why didn't you just set the max to 12tb? Also, how much animus are in twelve terabytes? Like, in terms of days, months, years?
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Feb 11, 2016 18:39
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tuyop posted:...you had 12tb of drives, why didn't you just set the max to 12tb? (I have way more than 12TB of storage and anime is stupid, thus I have none)
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Feb 11, 2016 18:49
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tuyop posted:...you had 12tb of drives, why didn't you just set the max to 12tb? Yeah, that's a funny thing. You know how space is calculated differently between drive manufacturers vs software? Well on top of that Storage Spaces uses a little bit of the space for what ever funky format table crap is in the background that you can't see. End result is I didn't know exactly how much total space is available until the drive gets added, and you can't add the drive without increasing the pool size, so I just increased it to max not realizing that it would misreport numbers since none of this was explained. I started to add up my anime just to be funny, but that's too much work. It isn't "mostly" anime on there.
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Feb 11, 2016 19:07
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tuyop posted:...you had 12tb of drives, why didn't you just set the max to 12tb? Porn really adds up when you go all--megaposts with your downloading, especially now that so much of it is in HD
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Feb 12, 2016 18:58
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TheScott2K posted:Porn really adds up when you go all--megaposts with your downloading, especially now that so much of it is in HD Yeah but how many days of porns is that? Say it's pure bluray quality, about 150mb/minute. That's 9gb per hour or 216 gb per day of porns. Per porn-day if you will. So a 12tb volume has 55 porn-days on it. You can watch porns every minute of each day for two months before you've seen every second of every porn once. If your average pornsesh is 30 minutes, and you have a sesh once a day, that's 2640 seshes in your pornvault. That's seven years of pornseshes, give or take a double sesh day. I imagine around year five you'll have forgotten year 1's material and find it arousing again, so maybe the OP has just created a post apocalyptic porn vault, which is probably better than anime I guess.
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Feb 12, 2016 19:44
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Someone has to archive this stuff for historical education when the servers inevitably shut down.
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Feb 12, 2016 19:58
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tuyop posted:Yeah but how many days of porns is that?  We should probably just delete the OP and replace it with tuyop's post
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Feb 12, 2016 20:07
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tuyop posted:I imagine around year five you'll have forgotten year 1's material and find it arousing again, so maybe the OP has just created a post apocalyptic porn vault, which is probably better than anime I guess. Just switch to hentai and get both at once.
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Feb 12, 2016 20:50
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Uthor posted:Just switch to hentai and get both at once. I don't understand. There's a difference?
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Feb 12, 2016 22:38
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Hentai PC isn't what HTPC stands for? Wait. Guess I will save my Home Server: Tentacle Edition post for another thread.
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Feb 12, 2016 23:16
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Here's our current setup: Win 7 Laptop running Kodi for the TV in the basement. The laptop is only on when we're watching, because it's loud as gently caress and lovely. Apple TV and iMac hooked up to the roommate's TV. I'm interested in sharing the media on Kodi in the basement with my roommate upstairs. I thought I could just grab Kodi for Apple TV, but he's basically never seen a keyboard before and it would be a headache for me to constantly troubleshoot that for him. What's a better option for sharing this stuff? I imagine I can setup an automator script to scan a samba folder periodically and copy whatever ends up in there, then let him manage it with his weirdo setup, but is that a good way to go?
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Feb 15, 2016 19:02
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Set up a Plex server for your roommate to access. I've had much better luck getting normal people used to Plex than the clusterfuck of knobs and switches that is Kodi.
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Feb 15, 2016 19:30
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TheScott2K posted:Set up a Plex server for your roommate to access. I've had much better luck getting normal people used to Plex than the clusterfuck of knobs and switches that is Kodi. Would the server have to be running all the time for the app to access the media on his end? I'm not really willing to pay for a subscription and I doubt that he is as well.
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Feb 15, 2016 19:34
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tuyop posted:Here's our current setup: So...where is the media stored? I'm assuming not on the laptop? I mean, whatever device has the media will have to be on when he wants wants to watch it...
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Feb 15, 2016 19:36
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Thermopyle posted:So...where is the media stored? I'm assuming not on the laptop? I mean, whatever device has the media will have to be on when he wants wants to watch it... Yeah, just stored on the laptop. I had a more elaborate thing set up before but it was easier in the end just to keep it on the laptop itself and just delete animus when space runs out.
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Feb 15, 2016 19:45
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tuyop posted:I imagine I can setup an automator script to scan a samba folder periodically and copy whatever ends up in there, then let him manage it with his weirdo setup, but is that a good way to go? Wha? If you want to be hands free of troubleshooting and leave it to him to figure out then I don't get why you don't just share the folder on the network and call it a day. tuyop posted:Yeah, just stored on the laptop. I had a more elaborate thing set up before but it was easier in the end just to keep it on the laptop itself and just delete animus when space runs out. Get 12TB and never delete again.
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Feb 15, 2016 20:31
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redhalo posted:Wha? If you want to be hands free of troubleshooting and leave it to him to figure out then I don't get why you don't just share the folder on the network and call it a day. This is a good point, the problem there would be that I'd have to either announce when our laptop is on so he can scramble and get a local copy, or set up a script to watch for the network folder and copy all new items (hence Automator). He's interested in possibly, maybe adding the $7 for a plex pass to the rent so all our laptop's media would just go into the cloud while we're using it and be available on his xbox whenever, right?
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Feb 15, 2016 21:12
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tuyop posted:This is a good point, the problem there would be that I'd have to either announce when our laptop is on so he can scramble and get a local copy, or set up a script to watch for the network folder and copy all new items (hence Automator). I don't use Plex to know for sure, but if your wanting to share the files with the laptop off it looks like Plex just uploads the files to Dropbox, Google Drive, or Box. You could just keep the files there and share with your room mate. edit: I just realized he's using xbox, he may have to use the Plex app after all unless someone knows how to access cloud sharing on there. redhalo fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Feb 15, 2016 |
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Feb 15, 2016 21:21
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I guess you could use the Plex Pass for its Cloud Sync, but uploading those big files to the cloud will probably take a long time (how fast is your upload speed?), and the laptop will still have to be on for that duration. If you are adding new content regularly, it might end up having to be on almost all the time anyway, and then your Internet connection is also ruined while it's uploading. Otherwise, the Plex Pass wouldn't add anything you need for your setup, you could use the free Plex server stuff. It still requires that your server is running to be able to access media on it. He can always just download the files while it's own, and that doesn't require the Plex Pass, but would have to be done manually, and at that point you might as well just share a folder without Plex and all that. I would just leave the laptop on 24/7 and throw it in a closet with a long HDMI running out if it's too loud.
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Feb 15, 2016 21:26
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tuyop posted:This is a good point, the problem there would be that I'd have to either announce when our laptop is on so he can scramble and get a local copy, or set up a script to watch for the network folder and copy all new items (hence Automator). No, no one will host your files without you paying for it, and plex or kodi or emby or whatever don't even offer the option. You could I guess upload all your media to dropbox or whatever, and then your buddy can download them...but, if you have a typical broadband connection, it will take eons to upload your poo poo...only to have it downloaded again by your buddy. The cheapest and best option is a server of some sort in your house/apartment that stays on all the time.
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Feb 15, 2016 22:45
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