'home media centre'

[eFestivals]

it also depends on what you want to play it on.

stuff will be played either thru an xbox 360 or a Raspberry Pi with XMBC.

[t8yman]

x360 will play mp4, avi, and wmv files without additional tinkering, windows based systems can add extra codecs for added filetype support via streaming over a network.

xbmc should be good with most stuff, but again - i would still recommend trial and error first.

that website has a pretty good music video section, with some great quality live shows available across most genres.

[eFestivals]

that website has a pretty good music video section, with some great quality live shows available across most genres.

thanks, but again that's not something I bother watching (I bet you think I'm a freak ).... to me it's the very worst experience a person can have of a band.

[Spindles]

It's also the best site on the net for obtaining post-glastonbury coverage (not that neil approves).

[Paul ™]

I've got Transmission working on my NAS now, and successfully had it download a film during the night (scheduled to happen in the not-using-internet hours).

This got me motivated to sort mine out the other day too.

I used to have a Buffalo Linkstation Live which had a built in torrent client so was good for leaving on overnight etc.

But I upgraded my NAS to a bigger HDD size so got a Seagate GoFlex Home, which sadly didn't have a built in torrent client.

After looking into Transmission, I found a site that gave instructions to go in via PuTTy using SSH to install a script on my NAS.. this took my ages as I have no experience or knowledge of doing that kind of thing, but eventually!! got it working.

I use transdroid to control Transmission from my phone. Much easier than using a webbrowser, and has a built in search facility.

http://www.transdroid.org/

Cheers will look into this.

Edited October 16, 2013 by Paul ™

[Paul ™]

Any way to mange your torrents on transmission if I was away from home? Only seems to work if on my home network.

[eFestivals]

Any way to mange your torrents on transmission if I was away from home? Only seems to work if on my home network.

you'd need to route incoming 'net traffic from your internet router to that machine.

But to be able to firstly send traffic to your router from anywhere on the net, you'd need to know its IP address - and I'm guessing that you don't have a fixed IP address?

If you don't have a fixed IP address, you either need to get one, or you'd need to use one of those domain re-direction services for non-fixed addresses.

I've got 6 fixed IP addresses on my BT Business account, I think it cost something like a fiver a year - so something like that might be an option.

You need to be careful about how you config everything. If you hook your NAS up to a fixed (internet) IP address then it's likely that devices using local IP addresses won't be able to see it as a local network device*.

(* I know some solutions around this, but i've no idea if they're actually the best solutions)

Edited October 16, 2013 by eFestivals

[Paul ™]

Ahh not a simple way then, as I'd like to set it up to use my tablet/mobile and laptop plus also got a few devices in the home that use the NAS

[eFestivals]

Ahh not a simple way then, as I'd like to set it up to use my tablet/mobile and laptop plus also got a few devices in the home that use the NAS

it's not particularly difficult, but getting a fixed IP address is the first step - cos without that there's no surefire way of knowing where your NAS is so that you can connect to it from the internet.

If your router allows you to route 'net traffic thru to your NAS when your NAS is using an internal network address (rather than the NAS using that net IP address directly), then that's the best set-up to go for.

[tHomBleached]

Have you tried the XBMC remote app for ios (and I'm guessing android)? Could get around the annoying hoops you need to go through in the xbmc frontend. Even picks up all the IMDB stuff in your library, and you can set if for different xbmc setups you may have in your house. I've got mine setup for three different locations in the house and can change easily.

Currently trying to setup mythTV on an SQL server on xbmc so i can finally go antenna free and it's a royal pain.

[eFestivals]

Have you tried the XBMC remote app for ios (and I'm guessing android)? Could get around the annoying hoops you need to go through in the xbmc frontend. Even picks up all the IMDB stuff in your library

you mean this one...?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.xbmc.android.remote&hl=en

(as far as technology goes, xmbc is pretty backwards at the mo).

[tHomBleached]

That's the one. Don't try the unoffical ones, they're pretty buggy. Have a play about with it, it's quite liberating queinng up what you're going to watch/listen to on the remote.

Only down side is that support for add-ons isn't great and you have to end up using the cursor functinality to use it. But for core functions in XBMC it's top notch.

[eFestivals]

yeah, i've been using it for a while.

[eFestivals]

Ooooo..... Stunning quality stream of the cootie on my raspberry pi .... Never had one anything like this good

[eFestivals]

I've started using the android app BubbleuPnP as a music player, so that I can play stuff from my NAS-based media centre to my stereo (via DLNA)

It's very good, but I'm wondering if anyone knows if there's an even better android app for playing to a DLNA device?

[windy_miller]

Ahh not a simple way then, as I'd like to set it up to use my tablet/mobile and laptop plus also got a few devices in the home that use the NAS

If you know what you are doing, you can use SSH tunneling. If you don't know what that is, then its probably not a good option as its a bit fiddly to set up.

As Neil says it is easier if you have a static IP address, however you can use a service like DynDNS or NoIP to set up a hostname that dynamically changes to you current IP address. Most NAS drives have this sort of stuff built in.

Edited October 21, 2013 by windy_miller

[eFestivals]

however you can use a service like DynDNS or NoIP to set up a hostname that dynamically changes to you current IP address.

I did suggest something like that in my first reply to Paul, but they're fallible as an idea because they only as good as the communication with that dynamic service - and the time you'd REALLY want access is the time that doesn't work.

As fixed IPs are so cheap and easy anyway, that's a far better way to go.

[windy_miller]

I did suggest something like that in my first reply to Paul, but they're fallible as an idea because they only as good as the communication with that dynamic service - and the time you'd REALLY want access is the time that doesn't work.

As fixed IPs are so cheap and easy anyway, that's a far better way to go.

They cache the last IP that you reported to them. 99.9999% of the time, that is the correct value. Unless you are on some dodgy ISP that changes your IP address every hour.

[eFestivals]

They cache the last IP that you reported to them. 99.9999% of the time, that is the correct value. Unless you are on some dodgy ISP that changes your IP address every hour.

your IP changes as and when it changes for whatever reasons.... which is a damned sight more often than 99.9999% represents.

Edited October 21, 2013 by eFestivals

[Paul ™]

Cheers guys but decided against it as the amount of times I'd actually need to use it outwith the home is minimal.. I'll just teach the O/H to use the torrent client

[eFestivals]

Cheers guys but decided against it as the amount of times I'd actually need to use it outwith the home is minimal.

you're probably right with that.

I initially set my NAS up on one of my fixed IPs, but the only time I used it was to show off to other people what it was possible to do, rather than doing anything meaningful.

(If I really needed to get onto my NAS I could do it by traversing another of my machines anyway).

Edited October 21, 2013 by eFestivals

[windy_miller]

your IP changes as and when it changes for whatever reasons.... which is a damned sight more often than 99.9999% represents.

Most ISPs will lease you an IP address which lasts for few days or weeks. Sometimes months. Most dynamic DNS services check if your IP address has changed once per hour. I've never once had a problem where the IP address was stale. Obviously it can happen but very rarely and you're never going to be waiting more than an hour. I don't think its any where near as big a problem as you are making out.

[eFestivals]

Most ISPs will lease you an IP address which lasts for few days or weeks. Sometimes months.

yep, that's how it's meant to work. Back in the real world it's something entirely different.

I generally have consoles to my servers running, so the line dropping is brought to my attention by those going dead - and while sometimes they can run for weeks, sometimes they'll drop many times in a day.

(and nope, there's not issues with my broadband - cos of the cock-up BT made when I moved 2 years ago and the efests-loving engineer i eventually had sent out, I've probably got the best setup broadband in Bristol)

Most dynamic DNS services check if your IP address has changed once per hour. I've never once had a problem where the IP address was stale. Obviously it can happen but very rarely and you're never going to be waiting more than an hour. I don't think its any where near as big a problem as you are making out.

while it might not be a big problem, only updated hourly is poor enough to knobble you when you're wanting it.

If you go to the trouble of setting up access to your home network you want to be able to access that home network at all points that the network connection is there, rather than have that connection but not know how to make use of it because the dynamic service is out of date.

Those dynamic services are a solution that might suit some people, but given the low costs of a fixed IP and the unreliability of those dynamic services, why bother with them?

[eFestivals]

Rather annoyingly, my lovely Marantz MCR603 stereo doesn't support gapless playback via DLNA and never will do (there's something lacking in the hardware for it) .... but apparently gapless playback does work via Airplay (which the stereo has).

Unfortunately, I get massive stuttering when using Airplay.

After googling this suggests to me that the stuttering could be the result of one of the following...

1. that an MP3 that is played via Airplay has to firstly be transposed, and the processor on the NAS isn't good enough for that transposing.

(note: I have no idea whether the music file has to be transposed, or whether Airplay is merely a way of transporting a music file in its existing format)

2. that the network connection speed to the stereo isn't good enough to stream to an Airplay device.

(note: the network connection is good enough for playing 320kbps mp3's via DLNA, or for streaming HD TV from the BBC iPlayer. I've not tested the speed in any other way).

3. that i have a cheap and nasty router (supplied by BT) that can't handle Airplay.

(note: the BT customer-to-customer forums are full of comments about problems with some BT Homehub routers and Airplay [whether used over wireless or wired]. However, I am using a 'business' hub [model number 2701HGV-C] and I can't find any comments either way about whether this router has problems with Airplay)

Does anyone know much about Airplay, to advise on which of the above may or may not be the issue please?

[eFestivals]

Stuttering would suggest either network speed or processing speed I would imagine?

Yep.

I've just tried streaming a track via Airplay, and then DLNA ... there's approximately 5 times less the bandwidth used when using DLNA compared to Airplay (around 50kbps against around 250kbps).

Also, when streaming via DLNA the NAS's graphical CPU monitor shows it as having a bit of capacity to spare, but not when it's streaming via Airplay.

So at the mo it's looking like the most likely culprit is the processor capacity, which isn't fast enough to transpose in real time.

I guess the real test would be to do some testing using my PC as the data source & control point, which I'll have a crack at now.