My PS3 only plays a handful of format videos. I’d like to find some kind of box I can hook up to the TV that will play any format video (.flv, .mkv, high quality mp4, etc).
If it could also play emulators and ROMs via a USB controller that would be awesome too. So it would probably need at least 2 USB ports (or 1 USB, 1 SD) plus a way to connect to the TV (RCA or HDMI).
Does anything cheap do this? Would Raspberry pi work?
It takes a bit of work to get it running but certainly a pi can do it. It’ll run the XBMC media player perfectly well and also numerous old-school emulators.
Will it run both emulators and media player at the same time though? Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t xbmc run from its own Linux based OS? Can you actually run emulators or other programs under that?
don’t know to be honest, I only set mine up to boot into XBMC.
Another option is to get a little android TV stick.Something like this
they’ll run anything that an android phone or tablet will. That includes media players and emulators at the same time.
Raspberry pi 2 seems pretty cool. It is $35, plus for another $7-10 I can get a case off amazon to store it in, so $45 total which is a decent price for a device that is both an emulator/ROM runner as well as a way to watch digital videos on my TV. Plus if I wanted I could hook up my external HD that I keep all my media on and just leave it there to have access to all my movies and music on the TV.
The raspberry pi 2 seems to have a microusb charge port so do you just use a cell phone charger to keep it plugged in? It has an HDMI port for the TV and 4 USB ports as well as a microSD. The 4 USB ports are pretty nice, I could use one as a wireless keyboard/mouse and still have open ones for transferring files via USB. I thought they only had 2 USB ports, but 4 is much easier to work with.
All well and good. I could put a 64GB microSD card I don’t use as the permanent storage, and then if I want to transfer video files I could use a USB stick.
How hard is the Raspberry Pi to operate? I am not really computer literate in the sense that I am not a tinkerer. I can download programs but that is about it. Does it come pre-loaded with a user friendly linux OS?
For video, I’ve found VLC media player excellent, it plays pretty much any file I throw at it. Could I download that onto the existing OS on the Pi?
Is there a list of starter programs for the Pi I can download, transfer via SD or USB storage onto the pi and load them?
Is the Pi fast enough to run emulators effectively?
If it can’t do both at once, just get two.
I am not sure if it can handle it but I am betting it’ll do as well as a Raspberry Pi. More expensive too but not awful.
Intel Compute Stick - $150