Standalone HDMI-output media players?

[wkearney99]

 Supports 2.5" internal SATA HDD up to 1TB; external SATA/IDE HDD up to 2TB

That's certainly an interesting option.  Appears to be a full computer, of sorts.  Android TV-based, I think.  DX has a number of similar items too.  Most don't seem to be running anything close to a current version of Android though.  Here again it leads to wandering down the fruitless path of fighting against "what ought to work" instead of getting a decent OOBE.  I love tinkering with stuff, but for this particular application I just want a degree of basic functionality that stays working without babysitting.

 

[wkearney99]

Got the player today.  It's nice bit of gear.  Tossed a few files onto a microSD card (it recognized a 16gb one) and tried playing a few files.
 
Ruh-roh, as Scooby might say...  
 
It's all over the map which video/audio codecs and resolution it'll play. I'm on the fence when it's worth figuring out what'll work or not.
 
Right away it won't play 1920x1080 clips from a GoPro Hero4.  I suspect they're 60fps clips, but the UI on the box showed "0 fps".  It plays them, but it's choppy, at best.
 
Um-kay... onward...
 
An mkv file containing The Princess Bride... no more rhymes now, I mean it... go ask that of your Alexa...
 
Anyway, the audio in that clip was playing much quicker than the video, WAY out of sync.  
 
An mp4 of Aladdin seem to play, granted it was ripped for an iPhone4 at 720x470...  I'm having flashbacks to the days of struggling to find the right combination of goats to sacrifice to get kids movies played back properly for the 2 year old on the boat's TV via the iPad2....
 
Hmmmm, while I'm all for finding bargains, I'm not quite willing to "save" on anything that's going to make too much work for me...  Oh, I know how to do all the fiddling... I just don't want to.
 
I suspect it's going to be a bit of a fool's errand trying to find the kind of thing I'm after here.  If only because the market, in general, probably doesn't really need such a thing, thus there's nobody bothering to make it.   This little box has all the right elements, except for the horsepower to actually deliver what I want.  Dang it...

 

[wkearney99]

I suspect if I aim toward units that claim to be capable of 4K I might have better luck. 
 
Don't see any like that on DX that have the hard buttons on the box, though.  I did find it helpful to have those.  
 
The little remotes that come with these things are notoriously horrible.  Bad placement of buttons, and just plain bad hardware in general.  Whatever I end up getting I'll be sure to see about snagging the IR commands into LIRC before the remote dies/gets lost...
 
I'm going to widen my search a bit and look for things that'll play Hero4 60fps videos from microSD.  That ought to set the bar high enough to handle most things.  Granted, that's no guarantee regarding audio codec and sync issues, but since I'd only be handling that kind of video at the high end, there ought to be enough left over for DVD-ripped media.

 

[pete_c]

Here getting two of micro alien look pc's to play with and will install KodiBuntu on one of them in the next few days....
 
 
BTW the Kodi guys say the best sticks (whether Intel / ARM) are the one's which rewrite the firmware and utilize Linux rather than Android.  Just writing what I have read...

 

[wkearney99]

Don't so much care about it being in the stick form-factor as much as being able to use either SD card or a USB-plugged disc drive.  More likely the former, a 64gb microSD would be able to hold plenty of selections for this 1280x720 display element.   That and be capable of being powered from a 2A USB socket via 5vdc.  
 
I may end up pressing JRMC into duty to handle automatically creating suitable copies of movies for ready-use of them.  Disc space is cheap enough these days to perhaps just rip a copy of everything ahead of time.  The trick being, of course, is that not everything lends itself to being transcoded in exactly the same way.  At least not from a cinemagraphic-quality perspective.  But it's just backyard movies so it's not like it matters THAT much...  But what does matter is avoiding the stupid audio/video sync mismatches borne from codec/software mistakes.  Anyway, that's a whole other thread...

 

[mikefamig]

Is this all in an attempt to play back recorded video? Do you guys record and save movies? There is so much streaming AV content available these days that I stopped using recorded movies shortly after VHS became obsolete. Am I alone in this? I did use a Hauppauge video capture box to grab some movies to share with a neighbor for a while but haven't used that in a while either.
 
Mike.

 

[wkearney99]

Is this all in an attempt to play back recorded video? Do you guys record and save movies?

If you follow the thread you'll know I'm looking for options to use with a portable projector. This being for use in a totally non-Wireless and electricity-free situation. It does no good to have a wealth of streaming solutions available if you can't get a network connection. Or if it's a terribly slow connection. That and there are a number of situations where you simply don't want to be paying to rent or otherwise access a film you might already have on your own physical media. So being able to play back straight from your own media is nice. Being able to do so with a low power or battery-operated connection is even better for the situation I'm investigating.

 

[pete_c]

Proving a point here about self powered tiny media tank....and optional streaming...
 
This weekend did a quickie test relating to streaming and the such from a hotel we stayed at.
 
Options at the hotel were:
 
1 - low speed internet access
2 - high speed internet access for streaming stuff
 
3 - my T-Mobile LTE tether
 
Tested with my T-Mobile LTE phone
 
1 - Testing the LTE speeds at 26 down and 20 up.
2 - enabled wireless tether / VPN IPSec tunnel to call home (well and my media).
 
I brought a laptop, media tank, touch tablet and micro router. 
 
Tried a VPN IPSec connection via an LTE wireless tether calling home.  Signal was good and speeds were fine on the phone.
 
Wirelessly / with IPSec VPN connection was slow and I could stream jitter like.  IPSec via hotel connections were not an issue relating to a VPN tunnel calling home.
 
Personally I would just tweak a micro pc with a large SSD on it with multiple video outputs with Ubuntu Kodi as your sure bet mechanism is getting the best bang for the buck.  You can customize the Kodi theme / interface to making it a very simple media tank if you want.  Putting it on line it'll download the video covers / info and save them to a local mySQL database.
 
You can run the new micro pcs off of a battery pack with no issue.  Here have a large heavy automotive/camping do what power supply with multiple voltage outputs for this or for that.  Thing weighs a bunch and most likely would run fine for hours connected to a media tank and mini projector.

 

[BaduFamily]

for the problem of 'traveling remotes chewing batteries due to inadvertent button presses' how about making a small carrier from this stuff ( http://www.fastcap.com/estore/pc/Kaizen-Foam-p13435.htm ) which can be purchased in deep enough form that you can make a little carrier case. probably tho at that point you may just get an otter box...

 

[wkearney99]

for the problem of 'traveling remotes chewing batteries due to inadvertent button presses'...
 
...probably tho at that point you may just get an otter box...

 
Right, the trick being finding something large enough to hold 'everything' effectively without the container itself being excessively large.
 
At the moment I've got a handy left over tin from some Ghirardelli chocolates.  It's just big enough to contain an Amazon Fire TV stick, voice remote and the Dashbon remote.  But I'd definitely like to move in the direction of a case with cut-out positions for each component.  Mainly to have a way to make sure everything's back in place.  As in, no positions empty.  This was a trick I learned with field toolkits some years ago.  No loops or holders left empty meant everything had been collected from the service work being done.  Nothing left behind.
 
Once I finalize what're the right pieces to be using I'll be able to begin the search for a proper way to store them.

 

[drvnbysound]

Is this all in an attempt to play back recorded video? Do you guys record and save movies? There is so much streaming AV content available these days that I stopped using recorded movies shortly after VHS became obsolete. Am I alone in this? I did use a Hauppauge video capture box to grab some movies to share with a neighbor for a while but haven't used that in a while either.
 
Mike.

 
Absolutely!!! I have close to 500 movies on my media server right now.
 
Streaming content is OK until your internet is down (or slow)... not to mention bandwidth caps are already here for most providers. I can't wait to have to choose a cable plan like I do a cell-data plan... /sarcasm
 
If you do a Google search for "[your ISP] data cap" you should be able to find information detailing what your current cap is. As of June 1, Comcast raised theirs from 300GB to 1TB per month. Having said that, I have family members who have 150GB caps.

 

[pete_c]

That is what I noticed while visiting a hotel last weekend (Renaissance).  Two paid by the night style internet services provided.
 
I went to using my cellular LTE connection via a VPN IPSec tunnel which did work for me.
 
ISP's that provide television are losing their customers to pure a la carte media stuff (music and videos) so they are starting to cap data (bucket lists).  They have to make up for their losses.
 
Here utilize satellite services (over 20 years now) for wife's television (and have cable).

 

[wkearney99]

ISP's that provide television are losing their customers to pure a la carte media stuff (music and videos) so they are starting to cap data (bucket lists).  They have to make up for their losses.

 
It's not my job to believe their lies regarding "losses".  From the little I've read they're not losing.  This is just a ploy to con the customers into accepting rate hikes and caps for IP services.

 

[wkearney99]

Meanwhile, I experimented a bit with JRMC.  It has the ability to create a 'portable device' for handling automation transcoding.  I used this some years ago to handle making mono MP3 tracks for a child's audio player.  Drag/drop tracks from the library to the 'portable device' and JRMC automatically handles queuing up the necessary conversions.  A portable device can be a drive letter or a pathname.  I just created a folder on a drive and configured it to convert to H264 videos.  Then I dragged folders from DVD rips.  It automatically figured out how to find the right video pieces for the main title from each and transcoded to a single .ts (transport stream) file.  Only downside is the filename doesn't have the title, just VIDEO_TS (1).ts and incrementing up (X) for each subsequent file.  
 
I could use JRMC to do this automatically with anything put in a playlist.  Disk space is cheap, so this might be a potential work-around for player limitations.

 

[pete_c]

You can also transcode the HD files to something a bit smaller as mentioned above. 
 
I used to do this for my first palm based  / CE based smart phones in the early 2000's for travel with portable media. 
 
That and purchased first combo LCD VCD portable players from Japan.  I was impressed with them.  My very first Panasonic Technics CD player (early 2000's) had video and audio outputs.
 
Easy to do these days whatever your source is.
 
Here have computers in automobiles while mostly play my music but also play live TV, transcoded movies from 1Tb drives and stream media from the internet via LTE celluar.