what do people do when they want to watch a movie or TV show they've downloaded?
what i do is bring my laptop over to the TV, plug in video and audio cables, and fire up VLC. which works, but it's annoying to go through that each time, and my computer becomes less than usable when it's rigged up like this (mainly because it's on the floor).
there are lots of "media streamers" for sale now. the idea is that it'll plug into your TV and then get video or audio files beamed over to it from your computer via the magic of wireless home networking.
some of these streamers have huge built-in hard drives, and some just cache and buffer the info as it comes in. some do the work of decoding the video themselves, and some delegate that to the host computer.
regardless, the main rub appears to be that in order to play back these files you need to use that media streamer's interface, and they all pretty universally appear to suck a55.
i have an "HD-ready" TV (which i have never seen HD content on) so whatever i get should be able to deal with 720p HD.
after looking at a trillion different products it seems like appleTV is actually the closest to what i need, but out of the box it won't play much, plus i'm tied into the whole iTunes thing, which i hate. however it does have 802.11n (the fastest wireless networking standard) and HDMI out.
my dream device: a DVR with a wireless card on it that mounts its hard drive wirelessly on my computer. i drop a divx or mov or avi on it, and bam - that file shows up in the DVR's video menu, with thumbnail and filename, just waiting for me to hit play.
― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 12:13 (seventeen years ago)
Alan has an excellent USB portable HD with video cable that you just plug into your TV and it will play all the video files from the HD.
― blueski, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 12:39 (seventeen years ago)
yeah it has a remote, they thought of almost everything
― blueski, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 13:02 (seventeen years ago)
but what i really want: LCD TV with built-in wireless+cable modem/router + freeview and it's own basic OS+browser (with boot time equivalent to Wii) so you can download stuff straight onto the TV's separate portable HD box as well as use it for basic surfing, emulator games etc. and read data from USB devices.
― blueski, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 13:11 (seventeen years ago)
i have a dvd player that plays divx. i just burn whole seasons of things as data files to DVD-Rs and then pop the discs into the player. it works perfectly!
― ^@^, Wednesday, 12 December 2007 14:23 (seventeen years ago)
There are hacks to let you play different formats on AppleTV, if you are willing to invest a little time in it. If you absolutely despise using iTunes, then there's no gettin' 'round that, tho.
― libcrypt, Thursday, 13 December 2007 14:15 (seventeen years ago)
Old xbox with xbox media center and a 300 gig drive on it - just ftp movies to it and sometimes I use a Phillips dvd player with a usb pen drive that plays xvid. I also don't burn cds/dvds anymore. Xbox 360 will also play xvid from a pen drive now.
― svend, Thursday, 13 December 2007 14:44 (seventeen years ago)