I have no budget for it. I need a power cleaner with at least 1000W of certified power delivery, pure sine business class abilities, to feed a gigantic Super Micro board, storage, etc.
I also need to install grounded power in the room where it’s situated, which I don’t know how to do myself. This house was built circa 1950 so it’s outlets only have 2 prongs.
Is hardware/gpu encoding better for some reason? I’ve looked into this in the past, a few times, and I’ve never gleaned a straight answer…
The reason is that there isn’t a good answere. AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all have hardware encoding built into their products but they all work diferently and in the case of Nvidia even between generations of gpu. This difference means that diferent hardware will get more or less support depending on developers preference. The advantage of hardware encodinggl is that it frees up your cpu to stream the media and do other tasks but its developer dependent on quality of execution. Software encoders put a lot of stress on your cpu but it will preform the same between processors.
Yea, that’s super interesting…
Because a home-built PC generally doesn’t have an “end of life” unlike game consoles. You’re subject to the service it’s required to connect to.
You’re just limited in so many ways with a game console.
Yes, a PC may be more complicated in the beginning but learning to set up your needs manually with a PC can teach you so much about how it all works. I would say from my own experience this often leads to realizing things you didn’t even know you could do with specific hardware.
I say custom PC hands down. You don’t need a raspberry pi even though that’s a great option. Any AMD/Intel PC from 2008 onwards should do just fine with an added GPU for hardware offloading
I do enjoy maxing a PC’s performance properties for media delivery… For years I was disappointed that the “media center” PC didn’t catch on in the market. The idea of using, for example, your Windows 7 license to host Media Center and using that to stream online services and host your own video content was way ahead of it’s time. I also loved the idea of having the flexibility to buy my own hardware and “super max” my own graphics procs with upgradability going forward, indefinitely. That would make that a sort of config an entertainment hub for my whole home, which was the big idea.
I was very pleased, on the other hand, that my PlayStation seemed to fill that void extremely well (at least to the extent that I didn’t try to use it to serve my own local media with it via the LAN, because it makes everything else you stream from the internet better, 720p->1080p, 480i->720i/p, etc., enhanced color for large color gamut TV’s, and enhanced audio processing, labor free. It’s excellent that way)
But I don’t think “end of life” is as big of an issue with consoles, from what I can tell. I mean, I’ve been very surprised to see ppl using and getting repair services for PS2’s, for example.
PlayStation Network, at least I’m guessing, will continue working no matter what generation of PlayStation you have because that’s just a protocol. PS4 seems to equal PS3 Network ports, with additional ports added. Please correct me if I’m wrong here. I think that’s the pattern for Xbox also.
Ideally, I would have loved to see that media center feature in Windows 7 brought to it’s fullest flower. It would probably be better in that it would have the potential of being the most flexible. I’ve just never seen anyone use the available modern software to pull that off. More power to you if you do that.
That’s why I was a bit confused as media “server” to me is literal as in serving media to other devices.
Raspberry Pi is a pretty neat little device but a home theater media powerhouse PC it is certainly not. Though you could use it as a media player, there are more powerful single board PC alternatives. If you want a decent tiny media PC, something like an Intel NUC (or clone) would better suit that task and would be worlds more versatile.
I don’t think it would be Sony necessarily shutting PS3 out of PSN the concern would be relying on Sony to properly patch a console that running proprietary closed source software and is almost 13 years old. I would say if you already have a PS3, by all means use it. If you don’t and are looking to get something for your home TV to stream netflix, just get yourself a Roku stick…they’re like 29 USD brand new.
It’s worth mentioning a Roku stick is shipped with proprietary software.
A better option than a Roku stick imo is a $50 refurbished Acer c720 Chromebook;
Just remove the write-protect screw, flash an open source UEFI (mrchromebox’s coreboot builds are very easy to install, and he provides simple instructions on his blog) then slap a 1TB m.2 SSD in it.
Next, install fedora silverblue. Then install Kodi media center from the flathub repo. This gives you one of the most minimal, secure Linux setups a chromebook can run. Everything is compartmentalized on silverblue, much like Android so a rogue app is confined in its’ given space. Kodi can be mapped to a folder cache on the 1TB drive to store all your media, or setup Netflix through Kodi with a video cache to save on bandwidth.
The Chromebook has an HDMI port, so you can close the screen and just have a flat square connected to your TV.
This has more storage, more ram, and more capabilities than a fire stick or Roku and it’s about the same price. And you get to use the Open Source UEFI coreboot bios 
As for a remote, the open-source Android app ‘Kore’ is available on the F-Droid app store. As long as your phone is connected to the same network as the Chromebook, you can use your phone as a touchscreen remote to control Kodi media center remotely. I consider it a smart remote at this point because it not only gives you the regular nav buttons, but also a summary of what you’re watching, IMDb ratings, and you can type in custom searches using your phone to search for your desired media.
There are plenty of open source programs out there that do exactly that, color enhancing, grain removal etc. Play station did not invent those.
I agree with the other guy as well, it’s not a good idea to use a 13yr old console that doesn’t run some form of Linux. Hackers are finding backdoors everyday and you’re subject to Playstation patching things on time.
I like all of this, except the aspects of it that endorse using wireless to stream video. I’ve used several streaming services over WiFi using smart bluray players and the video quality was noticeably worse over WiFi.
So, I like all of this except the aspects of it that include streaming the video itself over WIFI.
Playstation 3 still has a huge base of users, for now. I haven’t had many issues with it; I know that can always change, but I’m just letting you know that hasn’t been an issue for me and the system is still supported by Sony.
I never said anything about streaming video over WiFi.
That’s what the 1TB storage drive in the Chromebook is for.
If you mean you’d rather the Chromebook not be connected to the local network wirelessly, you can easily pick up a gigabit usb3-to-ethernet adapter from Amazon Basics. Works like a charm
For what it’s worth; I don’t like the idea of throwing out something perfectly usable anymore than you do. (Plus, you might be able to run your PS3 on Linux someday when PlayStation stops patching the console)
Given you would like to keep the PS3 on your network, I would recommend utilizing pfsense to create a sandboxed ‘DMZ’ vlan for your PS3 and other internet of things devices. This will ensure it never gains access to your other secured devices if anything bad were to happen through PSN.
You can also forward a group of ports to your PS3 securely through a DMZ vlan with upnp giving you an open nat, but isolating upnp to that specific network on that specific device. (upnp by design is a security risk, so this way you’re isolating the security risk)
If you don’t have any hardware for a pfsense router, you can be a smart cookie and figure out how to virtualize it on any available PC. If you don’t have an Ethernet switch to create more lan ports, you’re likely to have some garbage old wireless router lying around that can run either openwrt or dd-wrt. Once you flash either of those it’ll turn in to an Ethernet switch with wireless capabilities. 
Food for thought
I currently run it using a wire on the local network. I don’t typically like the idea of using a DMZ unless there is no other option.
It’s difficult to know how to strike a balance on a home network with limited vlans and network segregation.
Using the local network, I can block all superfluous ports that could potentially be leveraged against other locally connected stationary devices, but I realize that doesn’t provide separation from local cross communication on conventional ports or remote PSN network port abuse.
If I was going to go through all the trouble to separate things in an ideal way, I wouldn’t cut any corners on it. The reason is that I wouldn’t want to create additional maintenance problems for myself in the future. I like playing with these things, but only to the extent that I get them right and then only make changes as things are added or removed.
I don’t need or use uPnP for the PS3. It isn’t required for connectivity to PSN, but it is helpful if your particular device is “struggling”. I leave it globally disabled as I hope everyone else does.
I pose the question, not because I would like to keep the PS3 on my network. It is simply that it gives excellent picture quality improvement and is fine tuned by Sony for all video’s I watch. I don’t have to do any of this tuning myself, as I have with other media servers. That’s a huge benefit resulting from the gaming aspect of the device and a straight up raw double precision capability with locked down software. For color, sound quality, and clarity, I can’t overstate the niceness of this. I guess the question is more about, someone telling a story about achieving all this with the added benefit of securely hosting their own media, without compromising on any supported media formats, with all the given enhancements these consoles have, with the same ease of implementation, benefits, and more. Kinda like what Windows Media Center was suppose to be.
I don’t have an Ethernet switch that I can make changes too for this purpose. But I will likely use the one I have, as I did in the past, for this sort of thing in the future… Perhaps…
Well if you start using Plex or Emby or any other media server software, you won’t be able to leave UPnP blocked globally. You will find out you have to unblock UPnP so your network will be able to find your media server, which is the reason a lot of people use Vlans. At least that has been my experience.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Consoles have very little storage. Use a home media server to host and stream from - possibly to a console or other DLNA compatible device.
Stream TO a console by all means (one less HDMI port to use on your TV). But they suck for storage.
I have played with it a little, I don’t think the consoles, at least the PS3 I use, supports all the possible formats. But, otherwise, yea.
This is where plex comes in.
Plex will transcode for you if you have it on a powerful enough machine. It will also drop bit-rate for use over the internet, too.
I run plex as my media host, AppleTV/iPad/iPhone/web browser/whatever as a plex player. My PS3 died a while ago, but pretty sure it streamed from plex OK too.
Plex ran everything? Nice, I got the impression from the reading I did a while back that it wasn’t able to do everything. I was probably wrong. I only checked into it briefly. Nice news… So I suppose the next question is what storage technology is best to serve it up, and how do you keep the file system from getting corrupted by interlopers, lol. 