[H-GEN] android media centre?

[Russell Stuart]

On Sat, 2012-12-01 at 16:18 +1000, Peter Robinson wrote:
> I am currently using mythtv to record tv shows then transferring them to 
> a usb stick and then plugging that into the TV. I have been pondering on 
> getting some sort of android based media centre to surf the web from the 
> tv, watch iview etc and access the mythtv recordings on the pc.
> 
> Any experience/suggestions?

There is no iView for Android, unless your Android device still runs on
old version of Flash.

Apart from that there isn't much to separate Android for your favourite
Linux distribution, except if you pick the right Android device it
should play movies over HDMI out of the box.  Except that's not true
either - Linux have so many codec's just about anything will play -
assuming you can get the sound and HDMI working.  Android native player
- not so much.  For example it is isn't stereo or mono it won't play.
Some apps, like moboplayer, will transcode for you, but I haven't seen
any Android hardware with hardware that can cope with it.

One interesting combination is a Plex server on Linux + a Plex client on
the Android device.  The Plex server on Linux will do the transcoding
for you plus do all sorts of nice indexing as well.  The Plex Android
client will cost you $5 on Android (the server is free, but not open
source), play most things the server throws at it (it's a little buggy)
and displays the indexing information real prettily.  Android will do
most of the other things you want to do except watch iView.

There is no Plex client for Linux.  XBMC is the open source alternative,
but the Android version isn't ready for prime time.  But the client does
run on Linux though, as does iView.