[ubuntu-uk] Media Centre Advice

[Rob Beard]

On 11/05/10 15:07, Simon Swaysland wrote:
>
>
> On 11 May 2010 14:56, Adam Bagnall <adam at geekygeek.co.uk
> <mailto:adam at geekygeek.co.uk>> wrote:
>
>     If you're planning to go the revo route the dual core ones are £180
>     on ebuyer at the moment http://www.ebuyer.com/product/182588 Yup,
>     yet another post for a revo on hotukdeals...
>
>     --
>
> I was originally going to go down the XBOX360 route, but after much
> deliberation I thought the Revo route looked better. I've already got a
> PS3 and a Wii in the other room so I don't think I need another console.
> Or maybe I do!
>

 From experience (of having an XBOX360, Wii and PS3), out of the three 
the PS3 is the best of the three for media playback.

The XBOX360 is just too noisy for my liking (I have an XBOX360 Elite 
bought back in June last year, I don't think it's the Jasper motherboard 
but the one before it).

I also found that the XBOX is fussy about what it streams.  Windows 
Media format files play perfectly well (and are really good quality, 
Windows Media 5.1 audio is automatically converted to Dolby Digital 
5.1).  However most other media tends to need transcoding which is fine 
is you have a quickish PC to do that but I tend to leave the PC off when 
watching media.  It can also stream from Windows Media Centre but again 
I've found the transcoding awful quality.  This is using uPNP from PS3 
Media Server (which supports the XBOX360 and PS3).

The PS3 on the other hand will happily accept Divx/Xvid video files 
streamed from PS3 Media Server and it's also possible to transcode h264 
videos on the fly (it basically changes the container from a MKV file to 
a VOB which the PS3 supports, the h264 codec itself is already 
supported).  I find my PS3 can play just about anything I can throw at 
it when I use PS3 Media Server.

Where the Wii is concerned, I've got it soft-modded for homebrew and I 
have played some standard definition stuff in Mplayer on it and also 
streamed internet radio but it's not a patch on the original XBOX which 
we'd still be using if it wasn't for the fact that we now have a HDTV. 
In fact we have about 4 XBOX consoles (having been given two of them) 
and my step-kids up north have a soft-modded XBOX which also runs XBMC 
as a DVD/media player.

If I was going to build a dedicated media PC now (after my old one died 
last year) I'd probably go down the Revo route myself but also install 
MythTV to record the TV (I only have basic Virgin cable and Freeview). 
Saying that though, I'm sure I read somewhere that XBMC can connect to 
MythTV to play back recorded shows.

Rob