While I was looking for porn browsing tech news sites I found a little USB stick sized Android PC which is designed to plug into an HDMI TV and use either it's remote control or wireless USB mouse/keyboards. Nothing really hugely powerful or special except for being tiny and the fact that it is hardware designed to run the XBMC program - or the old Xbox Media Center ported over to Android, and has built in WiFi with which to do it.
It seemed interesting enough that I decided to do a bit of digging and found that people who buy these things tend to get some add-on's for XBMC, like Navi-X, which then streams movies/TV, etc, direct to your TV/PC online. I then found that XBMC and all it's add-ons are available free online and come in various platform versions, including standard PC, so I downloaded them and gave them a test run for the past 3 days. I am EXTREMELY impressed. Not only is this thing able to stream just about any movie/TV series, etc, you can think of, it even is able to do it over my puny 1.5MB connection that I am limited to out in the boonies here, and do it amazingly well.
I started out by testing Strippers vs Werewolves, Igor, and some classic Bob Hope & Bing Crosby road movies. Today I watched Inception, Prometheus and The Hurt Locker. All play flawlessly. So good, in fact, that I am seriously considering buying a couple of these little USB sized things and hooking them up to the TV's in the living room and bedroom. I already use big external hard drive media players and laptops hooked up to my TV's, but this concept is so small, simple, and works so well that it can instantly replace just about every entertainment drive/computer I have for watching movies or TV shows. Even better, there are PVR add-on's for the thing, so it can record while you watch, and that right there can take the place of about 75% of my torrent usage, without the legal risk of sharing any files or stuff like that.
Here is the little Android device:
http://androidtvbox.us/products/g-box-dyno/
Here's XBMC
http://xbmc.org/download/
Here's the Navi-X add-on I use (though there are literally thousands of add-ons for the XBMC program
https://code.google.com/p/navi-x/downloads/list
One cool thing is the XBMC program installs these add-on things straight from a zip file, without you having to unzip anything. It did take a little playing with to learn the ropes of everything, but once I did all I can say is the thing is impressive.
It seemed interesting enough that I decided to do a bit of digging and found that people who buy these things tend to get some add-on's for XBMC, like Navi-X, which then streams movies/TV, etc, direct to your TV/PC online. I then found that XBMC and all it's add-ons are available free online and come in various platform versions, including standard PC, so I downloaded them and gave them a test run for the past 3 days. I am EXTREMELY impressed. Not only is this thing able to stream just about any movie/TV series, etc, you can think of, it even is able to do it over my puny 1.5MB connection that I am limited to out in the boonies here, and do it amazingly well.
I started out by testing Strippers vs Werewolves, Igor, and some classic Bob Hope & Bing Crosby road movies. Today I watched Inception, Prometheus and The Hurt Locker. All play flawlessly. So good, in fact, that I am seriously considering buying a couple of these little USB sized things and hooking them up to the TV's in the living room and bedroom. I already use big external hard drive media players and laptops hooked up to my TV's, but this concept is so small, simple, and works so well that it can instantly replace just about every entertainment drive/computer I have for watching movies or TV shows. Even better, there are PVR add-on's for the thing, so it can record while you watch, and that right there can take the place of about 75% of my torrent usage, without the legal risk of sharing any files or stuff like that.
Here is the little Android device:
http://androidtvbox.us/products/g-box-dyno/
Here's XBMC
http://xbmc.org/download/
Here's the Navi-X add-on I use (though there are literally thousands of add-ons for the XBMC program
https://code.google.com/p/navi-x/downloads/list
One cool thing is the XBMC program installs these add-on things straight from a zip file, without you having to unzip anything. It did take a little playing with to learn the ropes of everything, but once I did all I can say is the thing is impressive.
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