So last March I purchased a Synology DS1515+ and wrote about it in one of my posts “Who Shall Control My Media? Part 4 – Backend Storage” and up until this weekend, it had been performing very well. On Saturday we went to watch a video and after hitting “Play”, the indicator that it was loading just spun. Since… Read More »
Since the Media Players post, I’ve been working on refining our setup and getting it to the point where I can stop tinkering with it and just leave it be to run. I believe I’m finally close to that point. With that in mind, here is the last post in this series, covering all of the back end… Read More »
So you’ve got a lot of videos, home movies, pictures, etc., that you want to have access to from all of your devices and get them on your big screen. Sounds simple, right? Its anything but. With the huge amount of competition and proprietary solutions out there it can be very confusing and extremely frustrating trying to figure… Read More »
Media players are a interesting topic. Over the past couple of years, we’ve tried a variety of them. The first one was back in 2007 and was the D-Link MediaLounge DSM-520 that got its media from a UPNP Media server. It was designed to fit into a home entertainment unit, the typical ~19 inches wide and looked a… Read More »
The infrastructure I’ve had our media setup on has changed quite a bit over the years, too. When I first started streaming stuff, I was using UPNP servers to serve a D-Link streamer. It worked pretty well for the first generation of this type of product. I used DiVX to encode our DVD collection, and things weren’t bad.… Read More »
Over the last couple of years, the entire media landscape has changed. We were quite happy with MythTV, but its pretty limited in its scope, it can only handle TV, Recorded TV, Videos, Music and Pictures that are on its local drives. Now, add in the fact that we’ve had a Roku now for a while, as well… Read More »
No, really, I wish I could quit you. Unfortunately, cable service is effectively a monopoly in most places. You’re the only company that can provide half way decent Internet speeds, and the only company that allows me to use a cable card for my MythTV setup. Why, oh, why do you make it so painfully frustrating whenever you call… Read More »
A couple months ago, my parents finally replaced their old Sony console TV (a tube TV) with a bright shiny new Samsung 60″ Smart TV. Its a thing of beauty. The picture is crisp and sharp and has excellent color. Being one of Samsung’s Smart TV’s, it also has networking capabilities and can stream things from the Internet.… Read More »
A few months ago we moved into a new place with a much smaller living room, it didn’t have nearly enough room for a full size computer case in the room. So it was time for a new, much smaller frontend for our MythTV setup. Size, noise, and being able to “hide” it are the primary concerns with… Read More »
So, in the last 3 weeks I’ve done a lot with MythTV. Most notably, I’ve finished the frontend system that is connected to our TV. There was a lot of trial and error, frustration and an entire system replacement, but its now up and near perfect. So, a week and a half ago Comcast got installed. I didn’t… Read More »