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Playing downloaded HD content?

Phynaz

Phynaz

Lifer
I'm going to make the jump to HD soon, picking out products now.

One thing I'm going to want to do is play back downloaded HD content without a pc. Any suggestions as far as a Blue-Ray player or other device for doing so? Need to support WMV, MKV and Divx Plus I imagine.

It must be easy to use for the entire family.

Thanks!
 
Maybe a WD TV Live?

When you say "without a pc", you mean that the HD file won't be streamed from the PC? I have a USB drive attached to my wd live but I do copy the files from my pc over my network to the usb drive. So, there's still a pc involved. I have played MKV's and I think I have played a WMV also. No idea about DIVX Plus.
 
Thanks. No PC meant no pc in the room.

For example to play SD DivX files right now I burn them to DVD-RW and stack them up next to the TV. When somebody wants to watch something they pickup a disc off the stack and pop it in the Phillips DVD player that has DivX support.

Edit: Interesting, you can hook an external hard drive to that device to store the content. I hadn't though of that, I was just thinking a thumb drive maybe.
 
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Yeah, my pc is in a totally different room. I have mine hard wired although I think it can be used wirelessly (not sure about streaming HD though).

I use to stream straight from my main pc but I didn't want to do that permanently. So, I found a good deal on a WD 1.5TB usb drive. Works great although you could also just use a usb thumb drive.

There are other alternatives that are on the market and some may have better features. I went with the WD as it was the first one i had ever heard about. The only thing I don't really like about it is the interface. Well, actually the navigation within the interface. I have to go through 4 or 5 steps just to play a movie. IOW, I select

Movies
Local Drives
USB Drive
Movie Folder
Scroll to the movie I want and select Enter
Then enter again to play the movie.


I wish it would let me set a default path to where I clicked Movies and it would go straight to my Movie folder. Not a huge deal but I could never set up a sequence on my Harmony remote to get me there quicker.
 
Unless you already have or were planning on getting an XBOX 360 or PS3, then the WD Live is probably the best choice. I will say that HD content doesn't stream well wirelessly, but that won't matter if you either connect the computer and WD Live with network cables or play the files off of an external hard drive connected directly to the WD Live.
 
By "downloaded" I hope you don't mean "stolen". Don't steal movies.

For playback, any DLNA-enabled device should work to stream off a desktop/server, though some may require transcoding at the source. Blu-Ray players in that category: PS3, Samsung C5500/C6500, LG390 (discontinued)... LG570/590 seem to have firmware issues at the moment with DLNA.
 
Phynaz said:
Fallen, PS3 is an option, does it play MKV files nativly?
Click to expand...

Not natively, but with PS3 Media Server you can play just about anything:

* switch to tsmuxer when video when h.264 video is PS3 compatible: Enable this! When MEncoder transcoding engine is used and PMS recognizes a PS3 compatible video it will switch to transcoding engine tsmuxer. The video will then be streamed directly or muxed but not transcoded! This setting will dramatically reduce the need of transcoding. Matroska video (mkv) for example aren’t supported on PS3. Mostly the contained audio and video stream is PS3 compatible. So tsmuxer creates a PS3 compatible m2ts container which contains the original audio and video stream and the PS3 is able to playback. This feature reduces both network traffic (because of better compression as MPG2) and CPU power needed for playback (Source).
Click to expand...

Edit: PS3 Media Server streams the video file from another computer.
 
From my expierence, the only issue with PS3 is that you can go faster than 1.5x when streaming HD content. With the WD Live, you can go as fast as 16x with HD content.
 
If you have the money for it the PS3 would be a very good option for this. As stated above, you can play pretty much any video format on the PS3 with PS3 Media Server installed on your PC. You can even copy the movies to the PS3's hard drive if you wish (for files that are natively supported on the PS3). On top of all of that, it's a blu ray player and a video game machine.
 
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Phynaz said:
Fallen, PS3 is an option, does it play MKV files nativly?
Click to expand...

No, but the free program mkv2vob can convert them to a container the PS3 will play without re-encoding, and it only takes as long as reading and writing the data, even with a slow processor. Figure a minute or less to do an hour-long show. So the hassle is trivial.

I run the free built-in Window IIS server on my laptop on my local network with a root in my media folder. The PS3 internet browser can see everything and stream or copy it over my wireless network. 720p content streams fine. 1080p needs to be copied to the PS3's hard drive first. I prefer that over DNLA servers, which all seem to be very buggy, bloated, and unreliable.
 
simonizor said:
If you have the money for it the PS3 would be a very good option for this. As stated above, you can play pretty much any video format on the PS3 with PS3 Media Server installed on your PC. You can even copy the movies to the PS3's hard drive if you wish (for files that are natively supported on the PS3). On top of all of that, it's a blu ray player and a video game machine.
Click to expand...

That's why I sold my Xbox 360 and got a PS3 Slim. It pretty much does everything.
 
wiretap said:
He said without a PC.. pretty specifically.
Click to expand...

Actually, this is what he said:

Phynaz said:
Thanks. No PC meant no pc in the room.
Click to expand...

I keep my vote with the PS3. He can either stream it from his PC with PS3 Media Server (PMS), or he can play the files directly off the PS3's hard drive with the extra (small) step of using mkv2vob for mkv files as thomsbrain already pointed out.

In addition to that, he gets a gaming system and BD player. My PS3 worked great with PMS until I built my HTPC. Now I use the PS3 just as a gaming and BD player, and it was well worth the money for just those things.

The main thing I dislike about the PS3 is the lack of an IR receiver for use with universal remotes. The Logitech Harmony Adapter, which can be found periodically for $40, solves that problem, but I wanted to be sure to point that out.
 
kalrith said:
The main thing I dislike about the PS3 is the lack of an IR receiver for use with universal remotes. The Logitech Harmony Adapter, which can be found periodically for $40, solves that problem, but I wanted to be sure to point that out.
Click to expand...

A full agreement here as well. There are other IR devices as well, personally I own the IR4PS3 (review here: http://www.remotecentral.com/reviews/ps3_control_roundup/ir4ps3_1.htm and http://www.remotecentral.com/articles/ir4ps3_full_function_ir_remote.htm )
 
Fallen Kell said:
A full agreement here as well. There are other IR devices as well, personally I own the IR4PS3 (review here: http://www.remotecentral.com/reviews/ps3_control_roundup/ir4ps3_1.htm and http://www.remotecentral.com/articles/ir4ps3_full_function_ir_remote.htm )
Click to expand...

I own that one as well (bought it before Logitech's came out). It was frustrating to pay $60 to add full IR capabilities to a $300 machine, but I hated the lack of functionality that my USB IR receiver gave me (and I certainly wasn't going to juggle multiple remotes!).
 
PS3 sucks as a media player. It uses far too much power, it's loud and hot due to that factor.. it doesn't have IR for a remote and needs special adapters/remotes, it needs transcoding or conversion to play popular formats and containers, has trouble with subtitles on embedded/external subtitles, etc.
 
wiretap said:
PS3 sucks as a media player. It uses far too much power, it's loud and hot due to that factor.. it doesn't have IR for a remote and needs special adapters/remotes, it needs transcoding or conversion to play popular formats and containers, has trouble with subtitles on embedded/external subtitles, etc.
Click to expand...

I don't have any of those problems. My slim is not loud at all, and it uses far less power than the fat PS3, nor is it hot in any way. If you have a compatible TV, you can turn on HDMI control in your settings (slim ps3), and this will allow you to use your TV's remote to control your PS3. The PS3 will also turn on whenever you change the channel to the PS3's channel, and it will turn the TV on and turn it to the correct channel if you turn on the PS3. The transcoding is extremely painless. All that you do is install PS3 Media Sever, tell it where your videos are, and the PS3 recognizes it instantly... no ports to forward, nothing else to configure. I have no problems with the video lagging or slow transcoding. I haven't had any trouble with subtitles. It sounds to me like you don't even own a PS3 because I have not had any of those issues.

For $300, you cannot get a more feature-rich media player, let alone a media player that plays video games, and has a blu ray drive.
 
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simonizor said:
All that you do is install PS3 Media Sever on a pretty powerful desktop computer, tell it where your videos are, and the PS3 recognizes it instantly... no ports to forward, nothing else to configure.
Click to expand...

Fixed that for you. And yes I have a PS3, and I got sick of trying to get it to do media playback adequately so I built an ION media appliance. The PS3 works great if your scale is small, but as soon as you hook it up to a library with a 1000+ movies in it, crossbar gets very unhappy.....
 
It really depends on what you want to do.
Are you satisfied with using whatever the device comes with for the menus and library or are you going to want to customize everything with box art, plot info, etc ?

If all you want to do is playback HD video in the common avi,mkv formats then get a set top box. You could go with a bluray combo device but I do not recommend them right now because there are some issues with playing back your own content that the players are not handling well since the primary focus of the design was bluray disc.

For set top boxes the market in the past 6 months has exploded. There are over 30 players on the market now. Most use either the realtek or sigma chipsets. The advantage of these devices is almost zero setup. Plug them in, turn on, play video. No drivers or other stuff to mess with. They also tend to use very little power, under 10 watts and are totally silent. Most have a usb port for external drives and some even offer esata for drives. Most also have network connectors for streaming from another pc. The ones I recommend:

Western Digital Live
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digita...3700028&sr=1-1

Seagate freeAgent
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAg...699990&sr=8-11

Brite-View BV-5005HD
http://www.amazon.com/Brite-View-BV-...3700049&sr=1-5

Patriot Box Office 1080p High-Definition Media Player PCMPBO25
http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Office...lp_edpp_ttl_in


I chose the western digital because I like to hack firmware on devices and the WD box is pretty easy to do that with to add other features like torrents, weather, customize the layout, etc.

If I had to buy again though I would probably get the patriot because it supports internal hard drives and has more external ports.
 
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