Looking for a good MEDIA player

[jonathan1107]

Hi guys, I''d like some suggestions for a home theater MEDIA player.

Something that can play litterally every format out there (photos, videos, audio). Stream from a PC or External Hard drive (I have a blu ray player that can play movies from the external hard drive, but it started freezing in the middle of streaming movies from the external HDD lately... for some unknown reason... I suspect troubles with power... since it's a 1x usb cable external hard drive without it's own power cable, it's powered by the usb cable...)

Ideally something that can stream through wi-fi dlna... bluetooth ...

I want something that's really good and not built cheap. Has to last me a good while.

N.B. HAS TO SUPPORT: 3D movies, 4k and all the latest formats

 

[W1zzard]

For that flexibility I would just build a compact Windows PC

 

[Aquinus]

You mean, something like a Roku but can do 3D and 4k with support for every format under the sun? I don't think that exists yet. Also you'll have a hard time streaming that stuff over wi-fi or bluetooth.

I would rephrase the question to say something more like, "I want to make my home theatre support 3D and 4k streaming from a DLNA server, how would I go about it?"

In which case, I would agree with W1zz:

For that flexibility I would just build a compact Windows PC

However I wouldn't put a firm requirement on Windows. XBMC or a variant of it may be acceptable depending on the hardware and the OS it's running under.

 

[XSI]

do you mean software or hardware?

 

[remixedcat]

Jriver!!!

 

[Aquinus]

If you used Linux and XBMC, you could run a miniDLNA server on your HTPC itself. That way the only time you ever stream is when you're not using your TV. That might be ideal depending on where you use your media the most. My server has miniDLNA running on it and my TV (itself, it has software built in,) can connect to it and supports .mkv but has limited support for various audio and video encodings are limited.

4K and 3D are hard things to support though. I can't say anything about these as I don't have either a 4k display or a 3D ready display, but from what I've gathered from people that do is that 4k is a little too new to start adopting and that 3D isn't all it's hyped up to be.

A HTPC would be the most "ready" to support 4k though when the software gets there. That's worth noting. Intel has been claiming for a while that its iGPUs' can hardware decode 4k h.264 streams since the HD 4000 on IVB I think.

 

[jonathan1107]

I apologize. Indeed I've not given many details. Here's what I mean:

I have a badass Home Theatre setup in my living room. I use it mainly for watching movies. Some movies I have on discs... so I just play em through the blu ray player, some of them I have in a digital form on my PC (that's where I get into obstacles)...

Indeed, I didn't think about having an HTPC... I must admit I'm not very familiar with the concept of an HTPC. I mean I know what's it's supposed to do but have no idea how it would work. For starters how on earth would an HTPC be able to output DTS master HD surround sound? Most soundcards I know of have zero high def sound outputs... some of them (high end) have an optical output. But if I remember correctly, optical outputs cannot output certain high end dolby formats (something about PCM vs bitstream etc...)

So yeah, I guess if you have an example of an HTPC I could look at (a link) or if you know what's the perfect way to setup a media playing device in the living room I'm all ears. I found some interesting devices like this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CHDSPSM/?tag=tec06d-20

although that one doesn't seem to have support for 4k material (which is ok because as of now, my tv is not a 4k tv, just would like to get ready for the future)

EDIT: I did find a thread about outputting DTS master hd sound, but there's a lot of stuff my "amateur geek brain" cannot understand (yet).


http://www.avsforum.com/forum/26-home-theater-computers/1507007-bitstreaming-dts-hd-ma-dolby-truehd-windows-htpc-not-working.html

 

[Aquinus]

Build one yourself with the hardware you need to do what you want. A lot of motherboards have optical and coax S/PDIF output and you still have HDMI as well. Worse comes to worse you might need to get an audio card that supports whatever signal you want to send over Coax or fiber, but you'll want to build something yourself. An HTPC is just a computer in a small chassis that's designed for being connected to a TV, that's all, but I would build it yourself.

DTS Master HD can be sent over HDMI 1.3 IIRC.

 

[remixedcat]

Get a D/A converter

 

[OneMoar]

htcp + mpc-hc + madvr = eye sex
just make sure you have a fairly beefy GPU if you wanna get the best upscaling