Best Media Player for Home Theater ( Under 10K)

[hunnymonu]

Greets to all

Please help me to clarify following queries :-

1)I am looking for a media player which can support multiple formats.
So friends could you please recommend one which has better decoding ( Hardware decoding ) with minimum quality loss for both Audio as well as Video files.

2)Hardware decoding vs Software Decoding , which one is better on quality basis ?

3)Do WD TV Live MEDIA PLYER & ASUS O MINI PLAY provide hardware coding?


Thanks in Anticipation

 

[ach82002]

In media players is how can we figure out if it is decoding with CPU(SOftware) or GPU(Hardware) as there is no task manager like we have in Windows .
I have OPlay HD2 which has almost similar software as in OPlay mini, it plays almost all the codecs well except few. Dolby Tru-HD is also supported but not DTS-HD MA. a few HD videos it struggles may because of codec used (did not check) but almost 95% of the contents it plays fine (even blu rays).
I think you should worry about hardware and software decoding in PC.
Hardware preferred, as per my thoughts.
No idea about WD live never used.

 

[danish]

THe best you can get is NUC i3 version. You can load Windows or Ubuntu or elac....and this will decode jus about anything..this has 4k support...

1. i3 is only 20% slower than i5 version.
2. It takes 7W to 25W max during idle & heavy load operation.
3. You can use this for full time torrenting & P2P.
4. Support Airplay & IR remote -- or yuo can use phone
5. You can attach USB 4TB HDDs to these and share them to the network.
However, I would certianly suggest seprate NAS becaues they are build for network storage. There sleep mechanism implmented in the NAS. NUC cannot act as NAS because this will make your USD HDD life shorter.

If you are good at computer building - you can go for a custom build with thin mini itx mobo, you can as well attach Blu ray drive and this HTPC will everything for you ....what a laptop or pc can do....

 

[nweipasti]

There sleep mechanism implmented in the NAS. NUC cannot act as NAS because this will make your USD HDD life shorter.

 

[ach82002]

Windows 7 though has powering off idle disk option in it's power management however it does not has option to set it individually for each drive.

The drives have spin down management in their firmware. This can be managed too for most of the drives with HDDScan (freeware).