I guess I have a new tradition making my last “great” simming/gaming computer my current home entertainment/game server (they seem to last forever these days).
No need for a “power gamer video card” there so I sell it for some pretty good coin LOL!
What to do now … hmmm … I’ll buy a cheap $50 NVIDIA Geforce 210 replacement simply for video quality. (Not recommended!!!)
Out of frustration from all the NVIDIA driver crashes I bought a $100 ASUS AMD Radeon RX 550 today. I think I’m a little more than happy with it.
These days i use a banana pi m1 as NAS (the m1 has the best SATA/Ethernet throughput of all the SOC under 200€) and a few raspberry pi 3s with xbian/kodi to play media off of that over LAN (though the raspi 3 has WIFI, so theoretically i could do without the copper). The raspi 3 GPU is limited to 1080p hardware transcoding, so it’s not an option if you want to go 4k, but for our comparatively small TVs it does more than nicely. Can’t go much cheaper than that, entertainment system wise, but still does everything i ever need.
Roku’s and Plex work well for me. Played around with Chromecast’s and Apple TV’s as well, but these ‘puck sized’ widgets are so cheap, silent and small that it’s nice to sneak one of those behind a TV and just do it like that.
I’ve built 3 different media servers over the years, but just ended up being owning and managing a huge media library. With RAID arrays and backups, home was beginning to feel too much like work. Now we own 3 Rokus and a Gb Internet connection, and let other people do that for US. I’ve also put a digital antenna in the attic and lucky to get a major networks over the air. I guess cable cutting put me over the edge. ESPN seems to think that my data plan is good enough to allow their streaming service even though we don’t have cable. The caveat is not being able to watch events live, but the second they are over, available for stream on Watch ESPN. I need to time shift most of the time any way.
Will be interesting getting Facebook into the content creation arms race. They have enough cash to go big if they hire the right creative talent.
A word of warning before you end up disappointed: Just mind that the bananapi itself is absolute crap for decoding (i think it’s the arcane GPU which has bare minimum driver support). It is only useful as a SATA/ethernet interface and general purpose small linux server. Video decoding with the bananapi will NOT work. This is why i went with the raspberry pi 3 as actual video source.
As for installing, it’s really relatively easy. There are media creation tools that you point to an image (in my case i use armbian on the bananapi and xbian/kodi on the rasberries) and the target (the SD card for the bananapi) and that’s it.
Depending on your usecase, you need to dive into the configuration of samba or whatever service you want to use to share data. A little bit of linux command line tinkering is required to get it all to work.
Not to mention it kept getting a NVwhatever.dll error while idling(!), especially after I added a second monitor. Heaven forbid I tried to add a third … nope … only two supported.
I’ll never buy a low end nVidia card again. At least the RX 550 scores a 25%! It can actually do some low level 3D well!! That’s 25x better than the Geforce 210 for about $40 bucks extra LOL! I think AMD did a good job with this board.
