# Time to upgrade the media player - Need Gigabit Ethernet



## panaman (Dec 16, 2008)

Let me give you a little info of my setup. My entire house is wired with CAT5E with two Trendnet TEG-S80G Gb switches.
I have a central Ubuntu server with 5TB of storage sharing my media which includes, movies, music and photos. Probably like most of you here, you have been ripping your dvd's and blurays and shoving them in boxes to never look at them again. (Because disks are so like 1990's). We usually watch movies and stuff in either the living room or my man cave. the living room has a Windows 7 pc running WMC, Boxee, and XBMC. This is our do-it all machine for the living room. It plays our netflix and all media. there is nothing this thing won't play. Its has GB ethernet. My 41GB MKV rip of my Avatar Blu-ray plays pefectly fine over the network. In my man cave, I have an Asus O!Play. Two things it lacks are Gb Ethernet and TrueHD support for my 7.1 surround system. The 100Mb network is probably the worse contributing factor. I have tweeked things a to squeeze as much out of this bandwidth lacking media player as I could. One thing I did was switch to NFS over samba. With samba the biggest file i could play was about 20GB, with NFS so far my 32GB rip of The Watchmen plays flawlessly. Avatar unfortunately will still studder over the network. (plays fine with local hard drive plugged into the O!Play). So anyway I am looking for a media player that has GB ethernet (preferably with jumbo frame support) and that supports TrueHD and DTS-HD. I don't need it to support netflix or huluplus since I have a PS3 and an Xbox360 already in my man cave. I've thought about building another media pc like i have in my living room but I really don't want to spend $500. I have been browsing amazon and newegg but I can't seem to find any that support Gb ethernet. It looks like the popcorn hour A-210 has Gb Ethernet but if you read all the forum posts about it. It sounds like the chipset is garbarge and only supports up to 125Mbit.... and in the end would probably be slower than my O!play's NFS mounting. If anyone knows of anything out there, I am all ears.


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## Fastslappy (Dec 23, 2010)

I use the D-Link DGL-4100 router with D-Link DGS-2205 switches in each room


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## panaman (Dec 16, 2008)

Fastslappy said:


> I use the D-Link DGL-4100 router with D-Link DGS-2205 switches in each room



I have the DGL-4100 as my router too....Trendnet switches are plugged together and then 1 goes to my router.... but thats only for jumbo frame support. My switches aren't the issue its the O!Play's 100Mbit Ethernet interface.


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## Fastslappy (Dec 23, 2010)

panaman said:


> I have the DGL-4100 as my router too....Trendnet switches are plugged together and then 1 goes to my router.... but thats only for jumbo frame support. My switches aren't the issue its the O!Play's 100Mbit Ethernet interface.


yeah I see ,the O!play's interface only does 100 
I use the man-cave HTPC set-up as my media player with 2 displays ,wireless mouse & I can pull folders from any PC in the house while watching a stream


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## panaman (Dec 16, 2008)

Fastslappy said:


> yeah I see ,the O!play's interface only does 100
> I use the man-cave HTPC set-up as my media player with 2 displays ,wireless mouse & I can pull folders from any PC in the house while watching a stream


yeah, my HTPC in my living room is pretty descent... i just use my Logitech Harmony 300 to control it. I have a little handheld keyboard mouse combo unit that i break out if i need to type something which is pretty rare.
I am just trying to avoid spending another $500 on something to play my movies when there are 100's of media players out there... just stinks that they all only have 100mb ethernet. I may just have to go ahead and build something as it seems that nothing really exists..... I might look into some of those dualcore atom boards with built in Nvidia ION Gpu's and just load XBMC on it.


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## panaman (Dec 16, 2008)

after doing a some windows shopping on the interwebs, I think I am just going to build another mediapc utilizing an i3 processor with the H55 chipset. Its supposed to be able to support TrueHD and DTS-HD. I'll just load mythbuntu on it or something. 

Lian-li has a pretty sweet ITX case for $100 bucks (PC-Q09FB) its smaller than a piece of paper.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112293

I priced everything out from newegg. It comes to $446 (including shipping).
Intel I3 550 CPU
GIGABYTE GA-H55N-USB3 ITX Motherboard
2GB DDR3 A-DATA memory
WD 320GB SATA 2.5" Hard Drive
Lian-li ITX Case
Rosewill WMC Remote

I think this is the best way to get all the power you need in a media player. The little setop $100-$200 just don't seem like they cut it. 
This system will give me GB ethernet and True-HD/DTS-HD

Now i just need to budget so I can purchase this thing


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## panaman (Dec 16, 2008)

i ended up doing it a bit cheaper, I had some old parts laying around. (motherboard, 2GB of DDR2, 80GB SATA HD)

So I ended up buying a microatx media case, Athlon II X2 250 CPU, radeon HD5450, and a Trendnet PCI GB Ethernet card, Windows MCE Remote. I ended up spending $200 bucks on all this stuff. I loaded ubuntu with XBMC and it plays everything i throw at it. Even my 40GB Avatar Blu-ray rip plays perfectly fine over the network.

I was a little worried about the case at first, it was only $50 at Microcenter and included a powersupply. It has one side exaust fan. I was kind of worried the fans would be loud, but I am impressed, it is extremely quiet... I have to put my head up close to it to even hear it. The case was easy to install everything and looks great. You can either lay down flat like a desktop or you can stand it up on its side using the included feet. I chose to lay it down flat. I just think it looks better that way with the rest of my setup. It is a low profile case so any cards have to be lowprofile you stick in it.
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0284178


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## Fastslappy (Dec 23, 2010)

Cool looks great IMO ...
I rather have a Home Theater PC myself anyday over a media center box , just cause once you buy a media center box then you are frozen in the tech of that moment , with a HTPC you can upgrade it on the fly at any time


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## panaman (Dec 16, 2008)

Fastslappy said:


> Cool looks great IMO ...
> I rather have a Home Theater PC myself anyday over a media center box , just cause once you buy a media center box then you are frozen in the tech of that moment , with a HTPC you can upgrade it on the fly at any time


Yeah, I tend to agree, plus you get more horse power under the hood with a HTPC. The only think I wish it could do is power on with the remote control. No big deal though.. I'll just leave it on 24 hours a day to help burn more coal :devil:

There is one new setop mediaplayer that looks interesting... its the new Western Digital one.. its like $200 bucks and has GB ethernet. I almost bought it... but I didn't want to gamble and see what it can or can't do. I new a media pc would play everything so I chose to spend the $200 on parts. Plus I have plenty of room for the mediapc in my mancave.
But I am still curious about the new WD player. Might be something to put in my bedroom.


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