I have a ton of media on my computer. Music, pictures, and 500 gigs of backed-up dvds (Ifo/Vob format). I would love to have some type of device connected to my TV, through network or some other means, to the computer and be able to watch them effortlessly. Something for my parents to use without any complaints. SageTV is out of the question. I don't want something that evolved. Radioshack used to sell a device that connected to your network and to your TV and it would access your computers media to display on the TV. It was clearenced out and I can't find it any more. Any Ideas? I apologize Moderator if this post is in the wrong Topic. I couldn't figure out were else to put it.
There are tons of products capable of doing this, but as funny as it might sound, the best device -- hands down -- to do what you described is good old original Xbox 1, provided that you mod it and install XBMC on it. It can connect directly to network shares (even SMB shares on Linux server), can play pretty much every format you can ever imagine plus the open source XBMC user interface beats all the commercial products. So, I'd buy a pre-modded original Xbox (360 wont do) and install XBMC on it. Easy to use and plays _all_ media you can imagine.
Dude, I forgot all about that!!! LOL. My buddy has one with like 100 games and he does the same thing. Any chance Xbox 360 does it also?
Well, X360 "sorta" does it, I have X360 myself, but it sucks. Basically the problem is called Microsoft. X360 hasn't been hacked in a way that it'd allow running unsigned code, thus there isn't XBMC available for it -- the X360's own media streaming system is a joke compared to XBMC, it requires all videos to be in WMV or otherwise they'll have to be re-encoded by your PC when streaming, it doesn't support network shares, etc.
Aaa yes Microsoft. I forgot all about the unsigned code. I read about that about a year ago. I was figuring someone hacked it all ready. But o well. Thanks for the info
