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Comment by peterhadlaw | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry PI has pretty much what you're looking for. I one set up exactly for this purpose.

Raspberry Pi is not really good as a media player. It struggles for high quality high bit rate 1080p videos and it is limited with USB 2 and does not have gigabit ethernet.

I use an older Pi with Raspbmc (osmc) and I can stream 1080P movies just fine. The key is to 1.) Avoid streaming off a slow disk e.g. NAS, 2.) Ensure you have the necessary bandwidth to stream (no slow wifi), and 3.) Pass DTS audio to your receiver for decoding so your PI isn't doing double duty for audio/video.

It is also worth looking at NFS if you use a NAS. I have been able to stream movies over terrible Wifi by switching from Samba to NFS. This wasn't with a Pi though.

Initially, I tried this setup..

    disk [usb]-> router <-[wifi]-> raspB+ <- tv

but it wasn't good for streaming videos over the network. The router was the problem.

so when we upgraded to rasp2, I tried this setup..

    disk [usb]-> raspB+ <-[eth]-> router <-[wifi]-> rasp2

..and it's been working like that, flawless, for almost a year so far.

The raspB+ shares the media collection over upnp, so we can consume it from pretty much everywhere on the house, and the rasp2 consumes using upnp so when can control it remotely.

With a combination of these apps, you can do pretty much everything remotely from your phone..

- upnp: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.droidupnp

- torrents: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.sugr.gearshi...

- run stuff: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=com.littlebyteso...

Now I just need a good radio support .. any ideas?

It streams 1080p h264 just fine, haven't had a single issue yet.

The only movie so far I've had problems with was a raw Blu-Ray rip of Pixar's Up that I streamed from my NAS. It has some crazy high bitrates and just refused to play smoothly even with all caches turned up to 11.

But that's the only one from hundreds of movies I've tested.

My Raspberry Pi 2 is working great as a media player. I threw OSMC on it (a Linux distribution specifically for Kodi with specific support for Pi's) and it is essentially flawless. It has no problem with high bit rate H264 videos. The lack of gigabit Ethernet isn't an issue. 100Mb Ethernet can easily stream raw Blu-Ray video (not that I've tried that with the Pi 2).

Second this.

We also use it as a upnp-server to stream (over usb wifi) music/movies to the kids room.

Plus the kids run emulation-station[0] on _top_ of OSMC to play games --we had a hell of fun playing 4 players games.

[0] http://emulationstation.org/

Not really true for Raspberry Pi 2. I'm running it with Kodi@OpenELEC next to my TV, it's set-up to connect to NFS via WiFi served by one of the SOHO Mikrotik routers. On the other end Synology DS215j NAS is cabled in via 1Gbit. No hiccup on 1080p/720p whatsoever despite WiFi choker, but haven't tried anything bitrate-crazy yet.

(For physical media I still just use a PS3.)

Currently the Broadcom GL driver and Webkit2 do not play well together. http://dabase.com/blog/Webkit_on_Rpi2/

I got burnt by this.

I've been thinking about a raspberry pi for this purpose but I'd prefer something already packaged up (even if it was a pi underneath).

Once the case, wireless adapter, and a few other items are added in to make the Raspberry Pi 2 function as a nice HTPC it comes out to about $100. The same cost for much less hardware.

I only used a Pi (1B) (20$) 4GB SD Card (5$?) case (6$) and hdmi cable (0.5$) My TV has HDMI CEC built in which means my tv remote works with the OSMC / Kodi / etc install. This gets me to a total of 31.5$ for my full HD supporting mediacenter :) (the case is even optional since it sits on the back of my TV, out of sight)

http://www.xbian.org/

XBian is a small, fast and lightweight media center distribution for the Raspberry Pi, CuBox-i, Hummingboard and many more devices to come. It is based on a minimal Debian and therefore offers much of the same freedom as Debian offers.

Very simple to install and get running.

If I'm not mistaken, one or more of the previous generation Roku devices uses the same SoC as the Raspberry Pi.

We have a Roku 1 and a Roku 3, and they are both great for the price. The $50 Roku 1 is attached to an old but "too good to throw away" Sony Trinitron CRT, and the Roku 3 is on our bedroom TV, a 27" Vizio LCD. They both stream via WiFi with no issues (480p on the 1, 1080p on the 3).

I did have a couple of RasPis running OSMC before we went with the Roku devices, and apart from issues with the initial setup, the Pis worked great. The Roku does offer a greater selection of services so there's a lot more 3rd party streaming content available there, and the official Plex app on Roku makes it easier to stream from our media server than the Pi, but if you know what you're doing you can enable uPnP on OSMC and local streaming mostly works fine. You can also run emulators on the Pi on top of OSMC, which is great for nostalgic gaming. The Roku 3 has a limited selection of games and a Wiimote-like remote, but no support for emulation that I'm aware of.

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