Hi.
I'm here because I'm an audiophile - I have over 300 CDs encoded to FLAC, and use pretty high end equipment to listen to music. I'm a sound purist.
Then a friend gave me a Synology DS212j (kind of old), I dropped two 3 TBs in it, and have fell in love with all that Synology offers. Because my music library is all lossless and in FLAC, I needed a media device that could play it without degrading quality. The clear choice was the WDTV, so I bought two of them - one for the living room, one for the bedroom. WDTV as far as I could tell at that time was the only set-top box type of device that supported Direct Play of uncompressed media.
Then I started remuxing and encoding my movies with MakeMKV, putting them on my NAS, and playing them from the WDTV. Everything was perfect. The only drawback for me was the WDTV didn't stream Amazon or NHL. Minor nitpicks I would work around.
Disaster struck last summer when my home was hit by lightning, and I lost nearly half my equipment - a $2,000 PC I built part for part, among a zillion other things. One of my WDTV boxes didn't make it. I had a funeral for it. I loved that little box. Come to find out, it appears that Western Digital doesn't really make the WDTV anymore, so the "all in one set-top box with Direct Play" was out. I went with a Roku 3 so I could stream all the online services I enjoy, and thought to myself that I'll just reencode all my mkv files with Handbrake to get them to go to the Roku 3. But as a purist, I didn't like the idea of compressing my uncompressed media. It's also too expensive for me to buy a NAS capable of transcoding to suit the Roku's compression requirements. It also takes about 3 hours for my PC to reencode a high bitrate mkv ("Dances with Wolves" bluray estimated 5 hours before I cancelled the process).
Since my PC was destroyed by the power surge, I replaced it with a HP Pavilion Mini, which functioned perfectly for my HTPC needs, except for one thing - my partner likes using a remote and not dealing with a fully functional OS (personally, I LOVED the idea, but I get her point).
My son turned me on to Raspberry Pi. He said for under $60, I could build a small device that could literally hang off the back of the TV that could support Direct Play of all my media, and that it uses this super cool interface called Kodi. I have been doing research for months and decided to order a Raspberry Pi 3, some heat sinks, and set up OpenElec. So for half the cost of the WDTV, I'll get way more functionality and versatility out of the RP3 than I ever did with the WDTV box. The RP3 board is on back-order right now, so I'm still waiting, but doing all the reading up on it that I can for once it arrives.
I'm excited to run through the forums to learn more!
I'm here because I'm an audiophile - I have over 300 CDs encoded to FLAC, and use pretty high end equipment to listen to music. I'm a sound purist.
Then a friend gave me a Synology DS212j (kind of old), I dropped two 3 TBs in it, and have fell in love with all that Synology offers. Because my music library is all lossless and in FLAC, I needed a media device that could play it without degrading quality. The clear choice was the WDTV, so I bought two of them - one for the living room, one for the bedroom. WDTV as far as I could tell at that time was the only set-top box type of device that supported Direct Play of uncompressed media.
Then I started remuxing and encoding my movies with MakeMKV, putting them on my NAS, and playing them from the WDTV. Everything was perfect. The only drawback for me was the WDTV didn't stream Amazon or NHL. Minor nitpicks I would work around.
Disaster struck last summer when my home was hit by lightning, and I lost nearly half my equipment - a $2,000 PC I built part for part, among a zillion other things. One of my WDTV boxes didn't make it. I had a funeral for it. I loved that little box. Come to find out, it appears that Western Digital doesn't really make the WDTV anymore, so the "all in one set-top box with Direct Play" was out. I went with a Roku 3 so I could stream all the online services I enjoy, and thought to myself that I'll just reencode all my mkv files with Handbrake to get them to go to the Roku 3. But as a purist, I didn't like the idea of compressing my uncompressed media. It's also too expensive for me to buy a NAS capable of transcoding to suit the Roku's compression requirements. It also takes about 3 hours for my PC to reencode a high bitrate mkv ("Dances with Wolves" bluray estimated 5 hours before I cancelled the process).
Since my PC was destroyed by the power surge, I replaced it with a HP Pavilion Mini, which functioned perfectly for my HTPC needs, except for one thing - my partner likes using a remote and not dealing with a fully functional OS (personally, I LOVED the idea, but I get her point).
My son turned me on to Raspberry Pi. He said for under $60, I could build a small device that could literally hang off the back of the TV that could support Direct Play of all my media, and that it uses this super cool interface called Kodi. I have been doing research for months and decided to order a Raspberry Pi 3, some heat sinks, and set up OpenElec. So for half the cost of the WDTV, I'll get way more functionality and versatility out of the RP3 than I ever did with the WDTV box. The RP3 board is on back-order right now, so I'm still waiting, but doing all the reading up on it that I can for once it arrives.
I'm excited to run through the forums to learn more!