Reassessing my setup with the Revue while I'm away from home. I'm starting to think that the level of complexity (networking, server software & hardware) that LMS is going to add to my Revue setup is not going to be worth the effort. At least not initially. In the end, using LMS with my Revue to play music from my FLAC library... might not give me the sound quality or the level granularity to navigate my music library that I get from my SB3<->SBS setup. This might change in the future... but so far, I don't believe the Revue will be able to reproduce the same quality of sound that the SB3 is capable of reproducing.
I will have a third multimedia player (Revue) setup which will allow my wife, visitors and I to watch movies/videos, view pictures and play music via the TV. This third setup should be easier for my wife to use and and less complex to maintain. When I'm home I will use my SB3 to play music and my Vudu box to play HDX movies. I will listen to the sound reproduced by both of these via my Hifi receiver and speakers. If the wife is alone at home she won't have to deal with turning on the receiver, having the correct input selected, making sure the SBS server in the closed has been successfully awaken via SB3-WOL, making sure that SugarCube is not enabled and dealing with the nuances of the SB3 and Vudu interfaces. Believe me I tried training her, but there are so many menus and settings. Most times she just throws the remote at me when I walk through the door. Remember... Wakeup-On-Lan and Vudu HDX sound like the Living-Dead to her. I'm going to explore using the Revue with a USB connected drive instead of LMS. The Revue has two USB 2.0 ports that support 2TB NTFS formatted drives. I will put a copy of my high bitrate MP3 library and a collection of videos and pictures in the external USB drive. I already have a full MP3 music library, transcoded from my FLAC library, which I use with my MP3 players. The Revue is always on standby. All the wife has to do is turn on the TV either via the regular cable STB remote or via the Revue keyboard controller. She'll be able to watch regular TV, rent movies from Netflix, listen to our music library and to Pandora via the TV build-in speakers. I will also connect a FoxL v2 that I use when I travel to the external speakers outputs of the TV to enhance the sound. I already showed her how to use some of the functions of the Revue via the keyboard controller and she's very happy because she can clearly see what she's doing via the TV screen. I even showed her how to navigate the music library while connected to my SBS using Whitebear. Btw, this does not mean that I will stop testing the Revue with LMS. I like the idea of having different media sources for the Revue. Right now it just means that the initial (default) Revue setup will be less complex to accommodate the wife. At this point, I don't even know if putting everything on a external USB drive will work as I expect it. I don't know if the Revue will index all the music in the drive. I don't even know how I will navigate and find the multimedia files once I put them in the USB drive. At this point I'm just speculating as I read a little bit more about the "potential" capabilities of the box. So far, what I dislike the most about the Revue is that I can not take full advantage of the full size keyboard controller. Not being able to find a specific track, album or artist name in your library by just typing a short string on the keyboard is a bit frustrating. Imaging something like Lazysearch tied to a full size keyboard to find the music you want to play and seeing a series of album covers displayed on the TV as the search narrows with every letter you type. Just a thought. -- tamanaco ------------------------------------------------------------------------ tamanaco's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4620 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=86628 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
