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I have to buy a Blu-ray player and a computer that can play movies, play music, run Spotify, surf the web, watch Youtube and run a SSH-client. It is going to be used for the shared kitchen at my dormitory and should be kind of foolproof and easy to use. 1) Does it make sense to buy a computer with built in Blu-ray drive? Or is the software players too bad? I recall that WinDVD and PowerDVD wasn't that great. It needs to work without any technical issues. Everytime. 2) Which computer should I get? 3) Which software should I install on it? 4) What do I do regarding remote control? 5) Any other things I should consider before making such a purchase? |
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Buy a cheap desktop computer and fill it up with hard-disks. Install Windows and XBMC on it. XBMC is a really nice and easy to use media center, and Windows will let you stream movies from the Internet (e.g. filmstriben, viaplay, netflix etc.) as well as all the other stuff you've mentioned. If you plan to connect a TV to your XBMC box you should also buy a USB HDMI CEC Adapter, this will let you control you media center from you TV remote. Windows + XBMC is also what I have considered myself. Still insecure on the Blu-ray question though. Guess I need to find out whether our Grundig TVs support HDMI CEC Seems like I can get XBMC to play encrypted DVDs and Blu-rays by installing AnyDVD HD. I'm very interested if anyone has any experience with such a setup. |
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I'd go for a small multimedia player a la Mele A1000/Mele A2000. It's dirt cheap (92 USD, postage incl.), runs Android 2.3 (so you can install all the apps you need), plays 1080p video, wifi (B/G/N), ethernet (100Mbit), SD card slot, 3x USB host, SATA, HDMI, SPDIF and RCA out. It even comes with a remote! I haven't tried it personally, but I've contemplated hooking my mom-in-law up with one. As it runs Android, you should be able to hack the distribution a bit and install a sshd to enable copying files to/from the attached HDD. It's available from Dealextreme. Much more information is available at the Rhombustech Allwinner A10 page, including links for other vendors. PS: No-one uses physical disks anymore. Seems nice, but... SSH is needed because we authenticate ourselves by having an open SSH-connection (that is we use authpf). Android kills the SSH connections after some time if the program is not in foreground (iOS likewise), thus Android is not really and option. I use ConnectBot as Android SSH client. Couldn't that be solved with a real shell (not an app), and setting TCPKeepAlive? As I've been blessed with a real Linux phone, the mighty N900, I have no real experience with Android, but I'd be shocked (SHOCKED!) if there wasn't an easy way to solve that particular problem. Yeah, it should be possible, I don't know what is wrong with ConnectBot, other programs can keep a connection alive just fine (e.g. IRC clients). |
