Video streaming to TV suggestions?

[Tester22]

I have tried a number of solutions and the best player so far is a patched AppleTV with NitoTV plugin. It has support for all video formats, HDMI, WIFI and audio files is synchronized directly from iTunes.

It takes some time to get everything working but it is worth it!

[wwarren]

ssart,
Thanks for mentioning the Netgear EVA8000. I hadn’t seen it before and after looking at a couple of Youtube video reviews of it, I think it might be promising. It handles the audio and video formats I need and will work with NAS drives. My only complaint is the UI looks a little plain. There are also a couple of off hand comments made in the videos about needing to keep a PC on for some functions to work that I need to investigate further. This looks like it may be a step up from the “almost not crappy” category.

[sansp00]

Tester22,
Could you post a bit more details about the nito plugin ?
Does it play high bitrate files ? Does it struggle with any container ?
Thanks
Patrick S.

[fizze]

I second that.
Never heard of it before. The only thing that hindered me from getting an AppleTV / mac mini as media streamer has been the lack of wide variety of supported codecs.

Also, for most of the hacks of the appleTV one needs to have an extra mac around. Is this the case here too?

[sonichouse]

Looks like NitoTV is a port of mplayer, so support for formats looks good.

More info here and here

there is a bootstrap for loading the plugin from a USB memory stick so I think you can do it without a mac.

[wwarren]

That USB stick patch is pretty slick, but the process to make the stick looks really complicated (here). It also seems like you need a Mac to make the USB stick files. Or, for $50, you can buy a pre-made USB stick on ebay.

[fizze]

Yeah, I’ce heard about that USB slipstream thingy. nice feat!
And I guess I want to get SSH running anyway.

The question is, wether there is deent support for HDTV videos on this thing.
Like H.264 720p, 1080i, 1080p? Or DivX/Xvid 720p,1080i,1080p?

A mac mini should be capable of the latter, not sure about the former.

[Tester22]

The USB patcher is really easy to use, but unfortunately like you said to create the stick itself you need to use a intel mac (running tiger). After the installation all new changes can be made by connecting using SSH.

The NitoTV is using both mplayer and native quicktime player, when the patchstick is applied it also installs perian that gives native support for almost any format available.

There is a great wiki with information about patching the AppleTV here: http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/

It is working with 740p on my tv but that is the highest resolution I can get, it might be possible to get even higher resolution.

[fizze]

Interesting. What about 1080i Xvid / Divx videos?
Or those WMV-HD showcase videos?

I sure hope mplayer’s codecs do have support for the GeForce 7300 🙂

[S80_UK]

Well, I just bagged a second hand SC200 on eBay at a good price – so I shall be playing with that later this week – and no doubt also fighting a load of new problems at the same time! 😆

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