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Figuring out this media thing
Dec. 8th, 2016 09:47 pmI've been running my media from a Plex server on my desktop, but I wanted to move everything to a NAS box. At the same time, I didn't want to spend $150 extra to get the Play model of the NAS box, because the reviews say it's kind of limited in what it can do anyway and only has a single hardware transcoding engine so it can only allow one file at a time to play on it.
I tried installing Kodi on the Raspberry Pi 2 that I have, but even with heat sinks and as much overclocking as it will handle, it still won't play videos anything like real time, they immediately get out of sync.
I played with a bunch of options, and was about to dedicate a spare laptop to the problem when I remembered that I have a Fire TV stick that I don't use for anything. A bit of investigation turned up the Vimu player on it for $2.75. It works very well, playing 1080p video full speed. It can't handle h.265 but I don't have that much content in that format, and I am willing to reencode a dozen files or so to fix this issue. So problem solved.
I'm a bit sad that Kodi doesn't work for this because it seems a nice interface. I might think about seeing how it does on the Intel Atom board I have lying around here somewhere, someday.
I tried installing Kodi on the Raspberry Pi 2 that I have, but even with heat sinks and as much overclocking as it will handle, it still won't play videos anything like real time, they immediately get out of sync.
I played with a bunch of options, and was about to dedicate a spare laptop to the problem when I remembered that I have a Fire TV stick that I don't use for anything. A bit of investigation turned up the Vimu player on it for $2.75. It works very well, playing 1080p video full speed. It can't handle h.265 but I don't have that much content in that format, and I am willing to reencode a dozen files or so to fix this issue. So problem solved.
I'm a bit sad that Kodi doesn't work for this because it seems a nice interface. I might think about seeing how it does on the Intel Atom board I have lying around here somewhere, someday.
