GRcade

I've been thinking about getting a NAS set-up. Is it worth tracking down the one in the OP? I've seen this Netgear one, which seems bit of a bargain. It's £65, but there's currently a deal where you can send off for a free 500GB HDD once you've bought it.

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/15751464/ ... oduct.html

Looks good TheTurnipKing

rinks wrote:I've been thinking about getting a NAS set-up. Is it worth tracking down the one in the OP? I've seen this Netgear one, which seems bit of a bargain. It's £65, but there's currently a deal where you can send off for a free 500GB HDD once you've bought it.

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/15751464/ ... oduct.html

Well a 500GB drive would set you back around £30-£35 so your NAS enclosure is only costing a small amount. It would certainly be a good start for your storage solution. I couldn't find out how many bays the NAS has for drives though.

rinks wrote:I've been thinking about getting a NAS set-up. Is it worth tracking down the one in the OP? I've seen this Netgear one, which seems bit of a bargain. It's £65, but there's currently a deal where you can send off for a free 500GB HDD once you've bought it.

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/15751464/ ... oduct.html

The storas from what ive heard are terrible avoid it ive got this and its amazing:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149510

Its perfect works really well is silent and the built in bit torrent client is so helpful

Just thought I'd mention that the emachine that Drunken_Master linked to has had another £20 taken off the preorder price, so it's now a mere £130 to preorder.

Yay! Just spent the best part of the weekend so far, organising my films so that the scrapers on XBMC will recognise them all properly. Pretty laborious process if you've got 9 years worth of downloads that need sorting. In addition I've managed to rescue an old PC I had lying about, (AMD 3000XP, 7600GT) which unfortunately has a knackered hard-drive. Luckily I've got a USB stick,so I've whacked XBMC-live on that. The PC is good enough to decode HD, and now that I've disconnected the fans it's pretty silent too I think I may hide it somewhere and use it as an additional media machine.

Also, just softmodded the kid's Wii, installed all their games to portable hard-drive and installed WiiMC. Which is a media player for Wii. It works pretty well too, streaming SD films over Wifi. Not going to bother trying HD as we've only got a composite cable and the Wii is pretty underpowered anyway. I really need to get a proper HTPC though, I think I'll wait till some Fusion based ones come out.

Nice. It is a royal pain but it only has to be done the once fortunately.

I'm currently going through my MP3s again, as iTunes is completely gooseberry fool and doesn't tag them properly and either corrupts them or only fills half the tags in.

I'm using MP3TAG to clean up the tags, most are okay, but quite a few albums have strawberry floated up metadata so they're showing the same album up multiple times in Media Centre etc.

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html

Hopefully I'll get some time this week to do a bit more work on the OP.

Drunken_Master wrote:I really need to get a proper HTPC though, I think I'll wait till some Fusion based ones come out.

To be honest, I think Fusion might actually be overkill in an HTPC.

TheTurnipKing wrote:

Drunken_Master wrote:I really need to get a proper HTPC though, I think I'll wait till some Fusion based ones come out.

To be honest, I think Fusion might actually be overkill in an HTPC.

Yeah, it probably is. Although to be fair, I didn't mean the LLANO based fusion chipset. Probably a HTPC based on the E-350 brazos chipset. I've seen the motherboard + CPU @ 99 euros. Just counting on someone bringing out a nettop with one inside at a decent price. At the moment, if I want to watch HD stuff I either have to sit in my den or commandeer the family laptop.

Bump.

Now that I've got a bit of money I've been doing a little research on this thing:

bear wrote:I got my brother one of these last christmas and it seems pretty happy with it:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Live-Hub-Media-Center-1TB/dp/B00466IEXE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308067509&sr=8-1
It plays most file types with the exception of flv(or at least it didn't play flv when I bought it) and the user interface is pretty nice. The built in hard drive works well for the setup he has but its not of much use if you are planning on streaming everything.

It sounded like it was perfect for what I wanted a box for, but then I read a few of the reviews, and found this:

you will notice it does NOT:

include HDMI cable
include USB cable
include Network cable
have built in wireless capability (you can attach a USB wireless dongle for wireless if you wish)

You can NOT attach your PC to one of the USB ports of the box to transfer files to/from the box.

It's basically the last bit that's the real problem. It doesn't have wireless out of the box, and I can't plug it straight into my computer? So if I bought it, I'd have to transfer everything on memory sticks? Not cool Does anyone know of a similar box (basically a hard drive you can plug into your telly) that can be plugged into your computer for data transfer? Or that has wi-fi out of the box. Although my home network isn't brilliant.

Just upgraded my -




to a -






Stick a 2TB HDD in that bitch and I'm away to go. Popcorn hour is a great way to store your movies.

http://www.networkedmediatank.com/

Frank wrote:
It's basically the last bit that's the real problem. It doesn't have wireless out of the box, and I can't plug it straight into my computer? So if I bought it, I'd have to transfer everything on memory sticks? Not cool Does anyone know of a similar box (basically a hard drive you can plug into your telly) that can be plugged into your computer for data transfer? Or that has wi-fi out of the box. Although my home network isn't brilliant.

See my Popcorn hour post

Got my ER1401 set up and almost ready to roll.

Mommy wrote:

Frank wrote:
It's basically the last bit that's the real problem. It doesn't have wireless out of the box, and I can't plug it straight into my computer? So if I bought it, I'd have to transfer everything on memory sticks? Not cool Does anyone know of a similar box (basically a hard drive you can plug into your telly) that can be plugged into your computer for data transfer? Or that has wi-fi out of the box. Although my home network isn't brilliant.

See my Popcorn hour post

Thanks Just been having a look, are they basically boxes you just stick a standard HDD in to? Are you planning on sticking a blu-ray drive into your C-200? Would be good to have some kind of... all-in-one device. Where'd you buy yours from, and how much was it in the end? I think $300 is slightly out of my price range, and the cheaper ones don't sound as good as the WD TV Live box.

Frank wrote:

Mommy wrote:

Frank wrote:
It's basically the last bit that's the real problem. It doesn't have wireless out of the box, and I can't plug it straight into my computer? So if I bought it, I'd have to transfer everything on memory sticks? Not cool Does anyone know of a similar box (basically a hard drive you can plug into your telly) that can be plugged into your computer for data transfer? Or that has wi-fi out of the box. Although my home network isn't brilliant.

See my Popcorn hour post

Thanks Just been having a look, are they basically boxes you just stick a standard HDD in to? Are you planning on sticking a blu-ray drive into your C-200? Would be good to have some kind of... all-in-one device. Where'd you buy yours from, and how much was it in the end? I think $300 is slightly out of my price range, and the cheaper ones don't sound as good as the WD TV Live box.

The A110 goes for about £100-120 on Ebay. I'll be shifting my one next week. It's ideal for playing .MKV files which was the reason I got it. I've got a 2GB drive (arrived yesterday) so I'll stick a Blu ray drive in too. www.advancedmp3players.co.uk are agents but ebay will be cheaper.

http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/shop/Gadgets.4/Popcorn_Hour.338/POPCORNA110-BGRADE/Popcorn_Hour_A-110_HD_Networked_Media_Tank__B_Grade_.4079.html?utm_source=Banner&utm_medium=Header&utm_campaign=PopcornA110Bgrade


£120 for a B-grade unit isn't bad but it doesn't come with a HDD.

TheTurnipKing wrote:Got my ER1401 set up and almost ready to roll.

Nice. I presume you're gonna use xbmc

Mommy wrote:http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/shop/Gadgets.4/Popcorn_Hour.338/POPCORNA110-BGRADE/Popcorn_Hour_A-110_HD_Networked_Media_Tank__B_Grade_.4079.html?utm_source=Banner&utm_medium=Header&utm_campaign=PopcornA110Bgrade


£120 for a B-grade unit isn't bad but it doesn't come with a HDD.

Yeah, I was just looking at that. The lack of a HDD is a bummer, though. What's the interface like (as everyone seems to complain about the WD one)? Can it do boxarts and everything?

Frank wrote:

Mommy wrote:http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/shop/Gadgets.4/Popcorn_Hour.338/POPCORNA110-BGRADE/Popcorn_Hour_A-110_HD_Networked_Media_Tank__B_Grade_.4079.html?utm_source=Banner&utm_medium=Header&utm_campaign=PopcornA110Bgrade


£120 for a B-grade unit isn't bad but it doesn't come with a HDD.

Yeah, I was just looking at that. The lack of a HDD is a bummer, though. What's the interface like (as everyone seems to complain about the WD one)? Can it do boxarts and everything?

I wrote my own frontend for it. It's basically just a single page of html at the front with hyperlinks to the different folder. There is a great system called YAMJ (yet another media jukebox) which does all the movie boxarts etc (as long as the movies are named to scene rules). The www.networkedmediatank.com website is very helpful too. The interface is very easy to follow and connectivity is a doddle.
I can't speak highly enough about it.

How long have you had that first Popcorn Hour Mommy?

My housemate bought one years ago from China when there wasn't much of an alternative to HD playback. They are very good. I think the newer models have flash based apps correct?

BID0 wrote:How long have you had that first Popcorn Hour Mommy?

My housemate bought one years ago from China when there wasn't much of an alternative to HD playback. They are very good. I think the newer models have flash based apps correct?

2 years roughly. I bought it due to the .MKV format not being available on the PS3 (yeah, I know it can be converted on the fly but it's hassle). I think the A200 & C200 play games and stuff - pretty cool.


One thing about the A110 is that it's easy to get movies onto it but the transfer speed on the way back is lame (about 2.5 meg per second.) Best not to need to do that by keeping a backup on and external HDD anyway. The A110 gets pretty warm too but if you get into the habit of switching the power off when not using it it's not an issue.