I wanted to build my own media player for a wile due to the disappointment with dedicated devices after I started to save my media on the computer.
At first it was the computer plugged in to the TV and using windows media but that wasn't ideal so when I got myself a Sony PS3 I used "PS3 media server" running on Windows.
 |
| PS3 Media Server |
Now this was okay but more times than I could count is crashed and I ended up restarting Windows or the PS3 or both due to the power of my PC or the network, DVD rips and other standard definition video played well, It was 1080p and Blu-rays that had issues stuttering and I had to re-code on the fly for them to play but that put a strain on the PCs CPU.
As my media storage got bigger as well as my frustration at the playback I began looking for a dedicated media player that would just read the files from the computer via the network, after looking around for a long time I ended up getting this.
 |
| DumeHDMax |
The Dune HD Max was at the time a great media player with a bad GUI and I had to run "Collection Management software" on Windows which wasn't ideal to give a better looking GUI
 |
| Dune GUI |
 |
| YaDIS GUI |
The Dune HD Max worked great, The network was fast enough and newly built Windows server didn't need to do anything just let the data through, but still at times Windows would mess it up by doing something to annoy me and stopping my media from playing, I figured the the Windows thought it was idle so did housekeeping and updates and such, So I installed Kodi and moved my new media server down to the Cinema Room and because windows was doing something it had no problems at all as I also turned off a lot of the Windows background tasks, now the only issue was noise from the Computer with that many hard drives.
When I moved up to 4K it was time to change and the only option was the Nvidia Sheld TV
 |
| Nvidia Sheld TV |
The Computer media server went back upstairs as the Nvidia Shield TV was so quiet and looked good on a big 4K TV, but it started giving me pains with Kodi and Dolby Atmos by not selecting the audio, crashing or freezing mid film but the worse was playing films with jump cuts and juddering when the films played fine in Kodi on Windows, It seemed to me that Windows Kodi worked better than Shield Kodi, or did it.
I cobbled together a PC from bits I had around and installed openELEC, wow much better and everything seems to work even 4K, apart from that dam PC noise.
I soon found out that LibreELEC was much better so moved over to that.
It was time to build my own LibreELEC media player that was silent.
