Raspberry Pi

[TrailMyx]

I dunno, in my area T-mobile is more than 3x faster than my basic Cox Cable internet access.  Latency is crap of course, but sustained download/upload speeds are remarkably fast.

[TrailMyx]

I've managed to knock back the multimedia charges.  Verizon to t-mobile goes from 120/mo to 63/mo and scaling back cox from 235 to 135.  The cellphone just seems to be more stable from year to year.  I've been overcharged by Verizon for years apparently.

[freddy]

you know what is crazy? i'm about 15 miles outside of washington dc and tmobile, att, sprint are useless here. The only carrier that works here is verizon. makes no sense right?

[TrailMyx]

I do miss Verizon's coverage.  Nobody can beat them.  Hopefully someday someone will..

[Endless Night]

I ditched cable except for net access a number of years ago and have never looked back.  Saved over $100 a month x3 years = $3600 so far. 

Can pickup local tv no problem and then netflix etc... for the rest.

[UOMaddog]

Well so far I've been unhappy with the Vizio Co Star so I'm looking for an alternate. Sadly, the Netflix app on my Vizio tv works better than the one on the Co Star! Also, the browser is finnicky at best and while you have the Google Play Store, the problem is that there are a TON of apps that I like (and use) that are NOT available for the Co Star for whatever reason ("compatability" ??). I haven't even hooked up my HD HomeRun Dual yet, but from what I've been reading, they say Windows Media Center works very well with it so now I'm contemplating a mini PC I can tuck behind my TV that will just run Windows 7.

Thoughts?

[TrailMyx]

Is there a reason why you didn't go with the Roku?

[UOMaddog]

Was looking for something with a Flash-enabled web browser so that I could stream TV via websites as well as something with a full qwerty keyboard. Also, it needs to be able to stream from my Zyxel NSA320 NAS that has all my movies on it (and handle .mkv and such)

[TrailMyx]

Take a look at the Minix Neo x7.  It's pretty good looking.  For Flash browsing, use the Puffin browser.  Everything else can be handled by XBMC.  I need to try and side-load Puffin on my Ouya.  XBMC works ok, but it's not as good as others out there.

[UOMaddog]

Just pre-ordered the Minix Neo x8-H ($149 and includes 2 freebies: the Minix M1 airmouse and an 8GB sd card plus some other little adapter crap) which runs Android 4.4 and has a much nicer CPU/GPU. Supposedly can handle 4K (which means it can't, but should be able to handle 1080P smoothly then since usually the rule of thumb is knock it down 1 tier for "smooth" playback). I'm pretty sure I'll like this one a lot more than the Co Star since its just plain old Android and no Google TV (and I thought Google TV would actually be better! Ha! What was I thinking?!?)

[TrailMyx]

Kewl, lemme know how that works.  I'm interested in it since both my RPi and Ouya just don't handle high-resolution stuff very well.  Part of it is licensing of the transcoding and others have to do with DTS causing stuttering woes with slower CPUs.

[UOMaddog]

Apparently the x8-H has hardware decoding for the audio so it won't matter what player app you use, it should be able to handle everything. We'll see how well it actually works, but I'll definitely post back here. It'll be a couple weeks before it comes in.

Here's where I pre-ordered if anyone else is interested:
http://www.geekbuying.com/item/MINIX-NEO-X8-H-Amlogic-S802-H-Quad-Core-2-0Ghz-Android-TV-BOX-2G-16G-Dual-Band-WIFI-2-4G-5-8G-Bluetooth-4-0-XBMC-Dolby-DTS-328163.html

[TrailMyx]

Did you have any experience with the WD media box?  That thing looks pretty good to stream to for just about all types of formats.  People complain that it's a pretty slow beast though.  I had pretty high hopes for the Ouya, but it's pretty darn slow when it comes to decoding just about everything.

[UOMaddog]

I did NOT try the WD box mainly because all the reviews I read said it was waaaay too slow. My wife is not a patient person so I knew that wouldn't fly! 

[TrailMyx]

So far the BEST XBMC platform for me has been my Zotac Nvidia Ion/Atom based HTPC running Windows 7.  We just watched Back to the Future on it without a single frame skip.  Since it runs Windows Media Center too, it works flawlessly with my HomeRun HD Prime for even the copy-once channels.

I had scaled my network speed to 5Mbps to see if I could stomach it, but I finally had enough of the slowness.  I bumped it back to 25Mbps.