Media Players

[saithan]

I was wondering by what means people are watching the drama series.

I have an xbox, boxee and pc for these things. But if possible I would like to watch the drama on boxee or xbox. => TV.

The challenge is that xbox is very limited on which files it can play and the same can be said about boxee. And that's kinda bothering me because they have such potential and that isn't being realized.

Just recently I learned that the filenames have a great influence on whether you can play a file on boxee, so if there are any special characters in the name other than "-" and "." you can be sure that boxee won't play that file. So I have to rename all files to a format that boxee should be able to play.

However just recently I ran into subtitle problems with the boxee, as it doesn't seem to be able to load .srt subtitles...

Xbox is a lot more limited despite all that power, curse you microsoft.

Anyone using other media players ?

[dtyc]

I use Patriot Box Office. They've been great; but since I updated the firmware, it's not running a regular external hard drive, only a "portable" or with AC adapter. I would love to know what other people are using also, because I think my Patriot may not survive all the updates in technology.

[dhisashi]

I use a WD TV Live (Western Digital).
It handles almost every file type. The one thing that it does not recognize though is the embedded subs in an mkv file. I have to find a softsub for these. It does both ass and srt subs.
PLUS you can vary the size and color of these external subs to suit your viewing.

I connect to a Samsung led TV via HDMI cable.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=330

I use both flash drives and external portable hard drives connected to a front usb port on the WD TV Live (not at the same time). It only has one usb input port.

I do not use the streaming part of the device. I only use the external file.

Cost was under $100.

[namihodai]

I am using my PC and it is connected to a my bedroom TV. I tried to use my PS3 or the little android box, that we have in the living room and when I am travelling I use my android tablet with MX Player Pro. But in my opinion the PC is still the best solution, because of the configuration possibilities of good video players like mplayer classic or vlc. Audio syncing can be done by a keyboard shortcut an if the softsubs are out of sync it can be also done by pressing some buttons. And if the video is scaled incorrect it is also easy to fix with a few button presses. I think the best solution for the TV would be either a small and silent pc or laptop with either windows or linux which is capable of playing video in your desired resolution to your TV over an hdmi connection and a wireless keyboard/touchpad/mouse. Of course it all depends on how important the playback quality is for you and it could change everyday, because someone could release a perfect media player for android.

[sensei991]

I've been using an Asus Air OPlay! for about 3 years. It's not perfect (occasionally needs resetting by unplugging) but it does upscaling to 1040p and works with .srt and .ass subtitles. It reads most of the usual file formats but for some reason will not work with the latest .mp4 downloads by \( -o _ o- )/. I find that I have to convert those files to another format such as .avi.

I bought the WiFi-enabled version to be able to use wireless streaming but soon found that the bit rate was not sufficient for HD files so I connect to my home network via ethernet.

The OPlay will also accommodate USB drives and memory cards and works with music and photos. There is no ability to connect to Netflix or other streaming media on my model but this may have changed with newer versions.

It looks like there is a wide range of prices for this and similar media players.

Good luck!

[fictionalistic]

I'll definitely have to check out these media players. I'm stuck using the weirdly laggy media player that came with my old laptop. D: