having read the most recent posts incl yrs, it is clear to me that xbmc generally can't passthru hd audio on most devices.

and yes, if one do media playback via xbmc, it's more to do with cosmetic reasons!

dune and many major brand players can surely do hd audio with usb playback. even my 4 yr old acryan can!

so can some androids, maybe most androids today..? but i mean with the native players, not via xbmc.

Connect external hard drive, Go to movies, add media location, set parameters and wait for xbmc to scrape and organize movie infos. Will take awhile depending on how many movies you are indexing.

You can also use MySQL as XBMC database and set the library update to be done server side. Useful if you have multiple clients/players. That's what I'm running at the moment.

Hmmm, how do I do this exactly? I'm all about efficiency but I've got over 1000 movie, TV series and anime files and I don't see myself manually constructing nfo files for each.

Hi paskal
how do u use external scraper?
Need to store movie info into movie folder
thanks

thanks

can you advise me on whic SATA expansion card to get. as i notice price varies a lot.
currently all 6 SATA is full on HDD(6 X 3TB). i need add 4 more ports for more HDD.

note: can the PSU 550w handle all 10 HDD's ?

why some people setup xbmc with sql? If that case i think better to use my netbook as NAS for hosting those media since it no use at there. Is this method ok? Performance will be good?

at the moment i put 1TB internal hdd first. later on will add hdd using 3 remaining usb port. will it be good?

Sorry if this has been discussed before, but i couldnt read all pages, only manage to read first 15 pages n get bored. lol.

I m new xbmc  user, having 5mpbs unifi. i thought that is sufficient for HD streaming (based on my reading from the first 15 pages), but i couldnt stream HD movie smoothly, never once.
i did manage to stream SD movie (sometimes) wtihout buffering at all, and some other times, here are cases where buffering appears every 5-6 mins.

is this normal, because if it is, i would consider upgrading my unifi to 10mbps. what i am afraid is that my xbmc box is causing the buffering. i m running on pc, conecting to tv via hdmi 10 meters away. my cpu is athlon x2, n gpu is low end sapphire GC. (i know, not the best PC spec available). I really hope it is my hadrware rather than connection speed as 5mbps is fast enough, i think.

i rea few things about audio causing the lag as well, but could not understand it completely. anyone can shed some lights here?

FYI, Google Nexus Player is available for pre-order again.

http://www.google.com/intl/all/nexus/player/

Yeah have to use forwarding service since they only ship to US.

Good to know...I have been using NFS for a few years now. Since my old media players then doesn't cut it to stream 20GB++ movies. Been loving it since.

Will try out SMB again since androids are 4.4 now. And now lollipop...blazingly fast? lol.

have a 24/7 i3 4130 NAS turned on 24/7, didnt really notice an increase in electricity bill before and after getting it
Haswell standby performance is REALLY low, not much to worry on terms of power consumption

I dont have a Kill-A-Watt meter or anything so can only give a subjective answer to this, but there are many data available online which further proves my point~

From kodi testing, the idle is at about 6w, and full steam also, around 15w only IIRC

power brick is rated at 65w, way way lower than a typical htpc. The i3 power brick needs a 45w one only!

my only reason to get this is due to having it being left on 24/7, hence need the low power consumption

yes, all your points are very true, and the main reason i went for that i3 rather than a simple celeron was because of plex. xbmc is used for playing back media on the tv, but with the plexbmc addon, so the core of my media consumption is the plex media server (on unRAID OS which is based on Slackware)

NUC is more of a really premium way of maxing out the capabilities of xbmc. iinm a raspberry pi isnt able to passthrough HD audio, though I have no idea if he needs that or even has a receiver capable of decoding those formats

its a sin to transcode remuxed BDs
those are usually played back on the TV on my fireTV. Plex is used only for series as they are watched using mobile devices by many in the house, or even when we're outside. Just tried a few scenarios:-( server is set at "make my CPU hurt" settings)

1 1080p transcode(with int. sub and max quality settings) and 1 720p transode(with int. sub and max quality settings)  was smooth,. do note audio was also being transcoded here.

3 720p transcode with the above settings was also smooth. 2 1080p trancodes at the same time wasnt possible without buffering on one client. This is more than enough for my current situation as most clients plys back the videos without video transcode and only audio transcode, which doesnt pose any issue up to 5 simultaneous transcodes( I have not tried more than that, as even 5 is an unlikely situation lol)

all the above transcodes are itunes videos(WEB-DLs)

did try with one remux, transformers 4 with similar settings as above, couldnt have another 720p trancode at the same time without buffering lol. But then again a movie is never played using plex on a mobile device, unless its a laptop, and that doesnt need a video transcode.

was almost gonna get a xeon while NAS shopping, glad I didnt but yeah transcoding is really heavy on the CPU

the raspi is a great client to get xbmc up and  running for someone who doesnt require much from xbmc (basically most of the casual users) but the board itself, with its appearance would most probably put off alot of people, thinking its something for advanced tinkerers

If only I can somehow get 23.976Hz and HD audio passthrough on my fireTV, things would be so perfect...

Switched to Google Nexus Player.

It was released around mid Nov. Got mine from Google Play store. You can find them for sale on eBay with varying markup.

Good news is, we might see licensed Android TV OS box from Chinese manufacturers soon. Allwinner seems to be working on one.

At the moment no support for local playback yet AFAIK.

On the bright side regards to Plex, direct stream and direct play of MKV files is supported.

Yup correct. I tested MKV and M2TS from NFS share (via Kodi). H.264 and MPEG2 played fine, only VC1 had issues.

new RPI 2 is out! with quadcore Arm7 900MHz and 1GB RAM

how many of you RPi users are upgrading?