That all makes sense. At the moment I'm still glad I have a cheap Hbo go account though as the missing features of Hbo now would frustrate me no end.

Question about home media set-up:

I have a LG HDTV that's about 5 years old (this one, I think). It's got a couple of USB slots and 3 HDMI ports. I have 1) a TiVo Premiere with a lifetime subscription connected to the TV via a receiver. It's a nice enough set-up -- TiVo works like a box for streaming media, so in addition to being a DVR, it lets me connect to Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, which are basically all I need for streaming content.

The only thing is, I have quite a bit of downloaded media file on my desktop PC (which is on the opposite side of the living room). It's connected to the Router that's sitting next to my TV by a super-long eternet cable. To have media files on my computer play on my TV, I have a Zotac Zbox connected to the router and the receiver -- it's basically a mini computer that lets me see the desktop content via home network and play it on my TV. The Zbox is now a few years old and wasn't that powerful to start with, and video playback is now super-slow and stuttery.

It's kind of a messy way to have PC video content play on TV to start with. Rather than getting a new mini-media player PC, I'm looking for an alternative. Roku box gets a lot of rave reviews, but I don't really need it because TiVO does most of the things it's known for (plus Roku is apparently not great for playing downloaded video files from PC?). I've heard mixed things about WD TV Live. And Chromecast would basically only play streaming video content from online, not a saved video files from a folder, right? My media files are not anything fancy -- mostly in .avi or .mp4, a handful of .mkv files (but mostly they're standard definition files). Anyone has recs on what might be a good device to get?

You can stream saved video files from a folder to your TV using Chromecast. [link]

Groupon has the Chromecast dongle for cheap [link]

Yay! That *would* be the simplest and cheapest option for sure if it can do that. Thanks!

Chromecast is good but my favorite is an Amazon Fire TV Stick with SPMC (an of shoot of XBMC) side loaded. It takes a bit of work to get set up but there are good walkthroughs and the XBMC interface is by far the best way to interact with media files. And it is powerful for the size: plays my very high quality HD bluray rips with DD and DTS sound over WiFi from my network share with no issues.

Chromecast doesn't do surround sound well and personally I like a physical remote. But if that isn't an issue it works well too.

Note: the fire tv stick is definitely NOT as good as a roku or even Chromecast for streaming options it just happens to work really well for local files using spmc.

I have the full FireTV, and like it much better than my AppleTV. I attached a tiny flash drive to it, so I can keep more apps installed, including XBMC (or whatever it's called now).

The stick can be a tad crashy when streaming for some reason. I'm sure the full fire tv doesn't have the same problem. But I got the stick for 19 and it works so I can't complain!

Not the simplest solution, but I built a media server from a Raspberry Pi B, RaspBMC (also a fork of XBMC), and a 3 TB external drive. Worked great once I (knowing almost no Linux) got the initial configuration worked out. Fortunately, the one piece of Linux I did know was sudo, and also fortunately, there are plenty of easy to follow tutorials to be found.

The one thing I haven't done is try streaming on it, but the only thing I currently stream is MLB.TV.

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