There are apps for everything. But could an old phone or something like the Nvidia shield TV replace a full fledged media PC?
Personally, my requirements for a media PC is that it needs to be able to stream the videos I have off of the NAS I have that is local, YouTube, and a web browser. I have actually yet to find any solution for streaming videos from my NAS. So if anyone knows of an app I could use for this I’d appreciate it.
Kodi? Emby? I think that works? For me Android works fairly well streaming from my rig to phone (in home wifi), but not too sure about having it hooked to a TV.
I recently got tired of my crappy Ethernet over power adapter and instead of upgrading it I just got a 30ft Cat6 cable. So now there would only be a gig switch, 30ft cat6, and 6inch cat6 cable between me and my WD MYCLOUD ex2 NAS. I've also used Kodi before on the AMD machine that is currently in use now with ubuntu as the kernal. It was hard to setup because of the limitations of my dumb mycloud. Ended up doing FTP as the connection type. I've since reinstalled windows 7 due to driver issues with every other OS and the crappy mobo. So I'm thinking I could slim up the overall space it takes with that shiny nvidia shield TV, which would also give me the ability to change youtube songs with my phone, like you can on shitty consoles, and actually can't do with a PC. and take the PC I have now, upgrade some parts and make it a bigger better faster NAS
You could pick up a RPi and an external drive and use that as your media player, there is probably a thing out there that would fit what you need. Just get one of those larger External HDDs and a USB wifi card (or not) and tape the thing to the HDD then hide it.
I haven't gotten the chance to play with an RPi for media, but from what I've seen it's pretty nice.
I actually have a Pi B and a Pi 2. I've tried both of them and they were never able to stream the video over the network and process it. I tried Kodi and VLC player and raspian default player and XBMC and the newer version of it (I forget the name). I even tried moving the movie locally on the Pi2 and it still wasn't able to smoothly play a 2Gb movie. I have movies that are way bigger than that too. I have 7 1TB hard drives In my desktop and 2 2tb drives in my NAS. Ideally I would like to move most all of them to 1 single location externally from my main workstation. I own the 1st gen Pi and my friend owns the Pi 2. I'm pretty decent at working with linux but my friend is like above Wendell with it. So there weren't any dumb mistakes (ie. no drivers). Maybe its just the files I have. which are kind of a wide variety of codecs and file types.
Most likely it was your video which was probably 10-bit (most video sourced from the internet is 10-bit). I'm not sure why you can't stream to it well, but if it is 10-bit it makes sense. Because there are no hardware decoders for 10-bit video on the RPi, it has to depend on the CPU to do the work, and that won't end well. Android devices also struggle with that too, even the Snapdragon 808 can struggle with 10-bit x264 with a high bitrate or extremely complex scenes.
Only solution to that is really to slap a video into 8-bit x264 and see what happens, it should help.
I also realized that with an Android phone you have to find one with HDMI or DP output, which seems rare nowadays.
to be honest I prob wouldn't ever use a phone for this. I was only attracted to the nvidia shield tv for its looks and I know people to get it fairly cheap, which lead to wondering if android would suffice. Which then lead to this post to see if anyone else out there was using android. but yea, I haven't really looked into much about the files I have. I'm not really a video kind of guy. I just download them usually from the magnet from popcorntime. I'm really into photography though. so I do know everything about my picture files :P I'll just wait until I can afford the rest of the builds I want to do probably. maybe my roomate will buy the shield tv or something