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Building a KODI box


jantony

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  • 3 weeks later...

Build an inexpensive home server, and stream to even less expensive set top devices instead. Building some powerful machine to play movies is a waste of money.

 

I have a headless Debian server set up with a Dual Core X2 Regor 250 CPU, 8Gb of RAM and it runs a minecraft server, UT2k4 server, SMB/FTP and Plex Media Server (and more)smooth as butter. I use a couple Ouya's, a Minix Neo X5 Mini, 2 Chromecast's, my main desktop PC and our laptops to stream to at least 4 of them at any given time no problem.

 

Kodi can use SMB and you can set up a shared library database with SQL...never really got into setting all that up myself, as I dropped XBMC before it turned into Kodi and went with Plex. I even play stuff on my cell phone from the server at home.

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  • 2 months later...

Or get a ARM based system such as Raspberry PI, its has a h.264 decoder, that should be more than enough for home movies. The main downside of the PI, 100MBit Ethernet connection (favour DAS over NAS) and limited power supply on USB ports, so you will need a powered USB hub to provide enough power for the HDD. USB2 should be more than enough 1080p.

 

On the plus side the wattage is lower than any Blu-Ray on the market :-)

 

Anyway NAS is not practical in rented apartments, for obvious reasons such as drilling holes in the way, no landlord is going to allow that. Plus NAS is also more expensive than DAS.

Edited by CJ Jackson
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I keep seeing people tout the Pi as a great use for this, I've tried mine for it numerous times even recently and it's very underwhelming...that thing just doesn't have enough balls to play back HD video.

 

Oh and 100Mbit Eth is plenty...not sure how it's a "downside". Very little in Gigabit offerings in consumer gear still today, because it's unnecessary.

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