Am I doing it wrong? What is a good box for watching downloaded videos?

[stilly]

So I had a WD LIVE box that was GREAT at running videos. All kinds of videos, Ripped, tv series, music videos, FPS Russia, Basically, our entertainment would be just about ANYTHING that I found on youtube, I would download and put it on the WD Live box.

Then I found torrents and started putting movie on it and tv series and stuff like that.

THEN this gor forsaken H.265 crap came out and nothing wanted to play. Turns out the WD Live box was a single processor. The H.265 needed a quad processor or better...


SO I got a MINIX box and I THOUGHT it was all good until I noticed a few things.

1. Some of my music videos are not able to be played.
2. Some of the you tube videos are not able to be played.
3. Some of my home made movies that I have shot are not able to be played.
4. Several other types of files can not be played.

The box has KODI 17.x built in and I was using that to play videos with cause it is simple and fun, but am I doing this wrong? I have the ability to connect to wifi and use it that way too, but I decided that it was better to just download things and put them onto flash driv es or external hdd and watch them that way instead.

Does anyone else have a box that is popular, fast and will do what we tell it to do and play what we want it to play?

Also, so far I have found that from time to time, I have to tell the box (and the WD live box too) to RESTART itself. It is like it fills up with cache and does not allow other things in.

Anyone got a better setup that is free? I do not pay a dime for OTA TV and watching whatever movies I want to watch now.

[the86d]

Firestick 4k with a USB hub?

[DrjonesUSA]

I've been running Plex for a long time and absolutely love it.

Plex is pretty "smart" in that it detects your hardware on both sides, and your bandwidth, and adjusts the quality automatically, pretty accurately. You can of course manually adjust too.

Here's my setup;

- Media is stored on a Windows PC I custom built with an i5 and 8GB RAM. Juns pretty much all movies perfectly. It's about 5+ years old too, so it's not even latest & greatest hardware, AND it doesn't yet have an SSD.

- Plex runs on the PC. This is what streams media to my any device; cell phone, iPad, Apple TV, etc.

- I have an Apple TV connected to the actual living room TV, and this has Plex built into it (Available on the App store actually; same thing)

I believe there are smart TV's out there that have plex built-in or available for download from the manufacturer's app store.

Plex will play just about any media type / file format out there.

You can also load photos, music; just about anything into it. If you can see it with your eyes or listen with your ears, Plex will probably play / display / stream it.

Check out www.plex.tv

It is amazing.

[DrjonesUSA]

So I had a WD LIVE box that was GREAT at running videos. All kinds of videos, Ripped, tv series, music videos, FPS Russia, Basically, our entertainment would be just about ANYTHING that I found on youtube, I would download and put it on the WD Live box.


THEN this gor forsaken H.265 crap came out and nothing wanted to play. Turns out the WD Live box was a single processor. The H.265 needed a quad processor or better...

Couple questions / points / follow up:

- Plex is free but they have an amazing paid tier; it's a one-time fee & unlocks all sorts of amazing features, including the ability to upload / backup your cell phone photos directly to your Plex server (PC).

- How do you download YouTube videos? I've got one or two websites I use but YouTube is always blocking them. PITA.

- H.265 should give you as good or better quality than other formats but at a smaller file size. Does it really have higher hardware requirements? Weird...

[stilly]

Firestick 4K is not good for me 86.

I would have to buy a firebox because my TV is an original Sony 720P HD from about 15+ years ago. HUGE piece of glass, but it is still light. Built in speakers too but it has an HDMI connection. No USB access from what I can tell and even if I did, the usb device would have to have a usb input AND be able to decode movies I want it to play. My TV does not stream.

Ok Drjones...

Hmm. Plex. I will look into that. I am not sure about having to program my box since I will have to do a factory reset every xx months, maybe every year or every other year. It started by NOT showing the thumbnail of a video, but just a generic icon. THAT is how I know a movie or video will not play. But makes no sense. I try to make most of my stuff H.264 but they fail to play on the Kodi still... Sucks.

As for downloading from MANY movie sites, I use a program called jdownloader. https://jdownloader.org/

It is VERY complicated though, once you set it up with your preferences and locations of folders and tell it what you want to download and how to download, you have to go through a very lengthy process of getting the movie. You right click the link in yourtube (or many other sites) and tell it to COPY to clipboard. Jdownloader will intercept it and put it up as a link and give you the audio, video, combined, thumbnail, or all of it, you just check off the things you want.

I do not care for h.265 stuff, but I am pretty much not worrying about converting them anymore. If they happen to be .265 then so be it.

I can not really run much on my master PC since it is Windows 7 x32 (yup, I said that) and I am in the slow process of rebuilding it, but until I do, I am making do with what I got.

I do NOT stream to anything but twitch. I Download, burn to BDR as archiving goes, then move some things to external drive to watch on TV, then delete the rest, rinse and repeat for rest of things...

[nine mil thrill]

I have a NVIDIA SHIELD. I have been doing everything you want with no problems. the SHIELD updates itself and has been outstanding. they are pricey for some.....but it really kicks butt !

[ibanezfoo]

I bought a bunch of Minix boxes for work because they are cheap and work relatively well for what we need (proprietary app in a fabrication facility). They are just computers. Look into some other apps to do what you want. Kodi is kind of dead from what I've seen. You can go old school XBMC or something like that.

I just use a Firestick with some shady apps (Cinema HD etc) and connect VLC to my home server with my ISOs and rips on there. If you don't have a server your router probably has a USB jack on it and can share out drives. VLC can connect to this no problem and plays ISO, plus all the MPG, MP4, etc codecs.

[JayEyeTee831]

I have a NVIDIA SHIELD. I have been doing everything you want with no problems. the SHIELD updates itself and has been outstanding. they are pricey for some.....but it really kicks butt !

i have a SHIELD as well but cant for the life of me play anything on my hard drives. All it shows is a blank drive when connected.

[OleCuss]

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- How do you download YouTube videos? I've got one or two websites I use but YouTube is always blocking them. PITA.
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I tried a number of different ways to download YouTube videos. The one which I tried hardest with (and generally failed) was Video Downloader.

What I finally found and has worked very nicely for me is "4K Downloader". I had to pay but it has worked nicely for me every single time - for YouTube.

I really don't know if it works well for any other sites. The only other sites I've tried it on were for woodworking videos (I'm subscribed and can get 'em anyway but 4K would be easier) and it doesn't work on those particular sites.

If you want/need to do things the clumsy way? Then you get Audials. With Audials I think you are actually pulling the video from your hardware and effectively recording rather than downloading.

I'm not sure about the details of why, but when using Audials on a few videos which were high quality nature videos (so quite a bit of detail) I've had stuttering/dropped frames when using a pretty fast laptop with 16GB of RAM. It may have more to do with the video "card" than the rest of the hardware but I really don't know that - and it plays the original video just fine.

[the86d]

$129 ?

https://www.amazon.com/Upgraded-Intel-Quad-Core-x5-Z8350-Computer/dp/B07VDGJNKB

Rii remote k/board mouse, or an Airmouse, on top?

[nine mil thrill]

I love my RII