I live in a New York City apartment and recently had a baby, which means that over the last 6 months or so I’ve been aggressively harvesting usable space. One of the most useful things I’ve done it’s rip/encode two decades’ worth of digital-media-on-physical-objects and store the discs offsite.
I’ve been using a Boxee Box to play my music and movies, but it was bricked by a firmware push. I picked up a Roku box to try in the meantime, but have been having a rough go of it finding the right way to play either basic rips (which Plex doesn’t recognize) or various encodings without having to live-transcode (which my dual-core Atom media machine can almost but not quite do fast enough).
Any suggestions on the best way to get a Roku box to play local network media that isn’t ”buy a new computer that can transcode fast enough”?
A Pun Involving Travel 
Might be worth trying the Plex media server and the Plex client on the Roku. Not sure it’ll transcode fast enough but doesn’t cut anything but time to try.
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Where are the media files, physically? NAS?
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Peter Radcliffe I’m using plex now, and it doesn’t transcode quite fast enough on any machine I have (though if I start something and then pause it for a long time, the transcode cache builds up enough to watch straight through).
Chris Conway yes, they’re on the other end of a wireless G network via SMB or NFS.
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The Roku is terrible for local media. I bought one to replace my trusty WD TV, which played everything, and I was sorely disappointed.
I ended up buying the WD TV Live, which has so far played everything I’ve thrown at it. At $90, it’s totally worth it.
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Streaming-Media-Player/dp/B005KOZNBW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349616218&sr=8-1&keywords=wd+tv+live
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I’ve also seen recommendations for the WD media players. I’d be all over them if they also ran a Plex client.
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Peter Radcliffe what do you use for your PMS? I really don’t have much idea how much horsepower it should take to transcode at 720p.
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A Mac mini. One or two gens back, but new enough to have built in HDMI with audio. It’s also plugged into the TV to run the display.
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If you have to stream to the Roku, sounds like you want to do your rips to MP4. Actually not sure why you wouldn’t want to rip directly to MP4 all the time anyways, but I haven’t messed with this stuff in a while. As an FYI, 7 years ago it cost about $6-$7 to buy a chip that could do full-speed decode of MP4 for HD, so even cheap crappy hardware should be able to support this. Probably some patent issue or something stupid preventing the actual playing of files you actually have being possible, but whatever. I’m going to rage now.
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