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I am currently loving streaming my video content onto my Samsung T.V. which includes watching youtube onto my big screen T.V. from Samsung Epic Touch 4g. But now I want to stream my blue ray dvds onto my big screen t.v. I know XDA is full of knowledgeable tech geeks. Thank you for helping me out.
There is no way that I'm aware of that you can stream blu rays from a computer to a TV. Two problems arise, one, I don't think you can stream an actual disk, but most importantly, the bit rate of a blu ray disk is so high that I don't think any network is actually capable of handling it. You only option would be to rip the movie and re-encode it to a smaller bit rate and resolution. Why not just hook up a blu ray player to your TV?
sputnik767 said:
There is no way that I'm aware of that you can stream blu rays from a computer to a TV. Two problems arise, one, I don't think you can stream an actual disk, but most importantly, the bit rate of a blu ray disk is so high that I don't think any network is actually capable of handling it. You only option would be to rip the movie and re-encode it to a smaller bit rate and resolution. Why not just hook up a blu ray player to your TV?
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Alternately you could just rip your blurays to your computer and then find a way to stream them... Or if you can't rip them, download a copy of the movie you already own from thepiratebay or something (legally because you already bought the movie) and throw it on a flash drive (assuming you have something capable of playing that hooked to your TV).
Blu-ray players are pretty cheap these days, as well...
jamice4u said:
I am currently loving streaming my video content onto my Samsung T.V. which includes watching youtube onto my big screen T.V. from Samsung Epic Touch 4g. But now I want to stream my blue ray dvds onto my big screen t.v. I know XDA is full of knowledgeable tech geeks. Thank you for helping me out.
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You cannot stream directly from the disc. You will need to rip them to your hard drive, and encode them into a compatible format. (h.264 in a .mkv container should work) Also if you're streaming wirelessly you'll probably want a dual-band wireless N setup.
sputnik767 said:
the bit rate of a blu ray disk is so high that I don't think any network is actually capable of handling it
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I think you are confusing the bandwidth of HDMI rather than Bluray. The physical 1x read speed of a disc player is 36 Mbps. Raw PCM sound + The max video bitrate comes out to 68 Mbps. If you could stream just the data from the player across to another device any modern 1 Gbps home network could easily handle it and still technically possible.
Problem is your not trying to transfer the data from the disc, since the receiving device needs raw unencrypted video there are 2 problems. HDCP, that should stop you right there. But once HDCP is defeated the raw video stream is yes faster than your network can handle. So we would need something re-compressing that on the fly into something the receiving device has a decoder for.
So yes in short as said already, not going to happen. As D-Tronic said once ou have something in a streamable or compatible for the device format your good to go. Unprotected Blu Rays should be easily ripped back to h.264/.263 containers depending on whats stored on the disc.
.....Though why would you stream a bluray disc to your big screen TV? If you have a bluray player then it should be connected to it. If the only player you have is a PC which is a very finicky setup for Bluray still you just need to connect it to the TV, buy a nice wireless mouse. There are wireless HDMI solutions I never looked to see if they support HDCP. Starting to sound like all you want to know is how to rip bluray discs.
Thank all of you guys for your replies now that I know I am doing something that is technically impossible. I will forget about streaming blue rays on to my computer and just use my hdmi cable from my laptop to my T.V. set. I spent 3 hours researching on google trying to figure this out. One article claimed you could use windows media player to stream the dvds but I could never get window media player to show up on my network. The only thing that showed up was all share. The reason I wanted to do this is because I have a computer and laptop that are capable of playing blue ray and I did not want to spend and more money to duplicate something that my computers should be able to do. I also want to make my desktop computer my main media hub and my main back up service. Since I have a 2TB hard drive in this bad boy. Thanks again for all of your answers.
RainMotorsports said:
I think you are confusing the bandwidth of HDMI rather than Bluray. The physical 1x read speed of a disc player is 36 Mbps. Raw PCM sound + The max video bitrate comes out to 68 Mbps. If you could stream just the data from the player across to another device any modern 1 Gbps home network could easily handle it and still technically possible.
Problem is your not trying to transfer the data from the disc, since the receiving device needs raw unencrypted video there are 2 problems. HDCP, that should stop you right there. But once HDCP is defeated the raw video stream is yes faster than your network can handle. So we would need something re-compressing that on the fly into something the receiving device has a decoder for.
So yes in short as said already, not going to happen. As D-Tronic said once ou have something in a streamable or compatible for the device format your good to go. Unprotected Blu Rays should be easily ripped back to h.264/.263 containers depending on whats stored on the disc.
.....Though why would you stream a bluray disc to your big screen TV? If you have a bluray player then it should be connected to it. If the only player you have is a PC which is a very finicky setup for Bluray still you just need to connect it to the TV, buy a nice wireless mouse. There are wireless HDMI solutions I never looked to see if they support HDCP. Starting to sound like all you want to know is how to rip bluray discs.
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Thanks, yea, I was mistaking the HDMI bandwidth. But what you are saying makes complete sense.
---------- Post added at 05:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:25 PM ----------
jamice4u said:
Thank all of you guys for your replies now that I know I am doing something that is technically impossible. I will forget about streaming blue rays on to my computer and just use my hdmi cable from my laptop to my T.V. set. I spent 3 hours researching on google trying to figure this out. One article claimed you could use windows media player to stream the dvds but I could never get window media player to show up on my network. The only thing that showed up was all share. The reason I wanted to do this is because I have a computer and laptop that are capable of playing blue ray and I did not want to spend and more money to duplicate something that my computers should be able to do. I also want to make my desktop computer my main media hub and my main back up service. Since I have a 2TB hard drive in this bad boy. Thanks again for all of your answers.
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The solution to your problem is easy. All you need is DVDFab HD Decrypter to rip the blu ray to your hard drive, and a program like StaxRip to encode it to h.264 MKV. Both programs are free and relatively easy to figure out. I rip all of my blu rays and store them on my HTPC, simply because I don't like shuffling disks, and I encode them videos keeping the HD audio intact, because my computer is able to bitstream HD Audio (DTS-HD MASTER or Dolby TrueHD) to my AVR. I have to warn you though, encoding a blu ray at very high quality takes a long time. I have an overclocked 6-core AMD Phenom II CPU running at 4.2 Ghz on water cooling, and a typical action movie can take as much as 15-20 hours to encode. But my rips are imperceptible from the original, quality-wise.
sputnik767 said:
Thanks, yea, I was mistaking the HDMI bandwidth. But what you are saying makes complete sense.
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Being 4:30 in the morning i did mess up on a couple things like I meant "Over 100 Mbps its still technically possible". But yeah now that we know he has a laptop I have to lol just a little. Good stuff.
Use a MHL adapter.. but doesnt work on aosp roms at the moment for ics.. cut the pc out all together..
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RainMotorsports said:
Being 4:30 in the morning i did mess up on a couple things like I meant "Over 100 Mbps its still technically possible". But yeah now that we know he has a laptop I have to lol just a little. Good stuff.
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Yea, lol, a blu-ray capable laptop makes things very easy. All he needs is an HDMI cable and something like PowerDVD to play the blu rays. He is asking about Windows Media Player, but that is unable to decode a blu-ray disk AFAIK. I'm pretty sure those codecs are still proprietary. I am not aware of any free software solution to play blu rays.
sputnik767 said:
Yea, lol, a blu-ray capable laptop makes things very easy. All he needs is an HDMI cable and something like PowerDVD to play the blu rays. He is asking about Windows Media Player, but that is unable to decode a blu-ray disk AFAIK. I'm pretty sure those codecs are still proprietary. I am not aware of any free software solution to play blu rays.
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They actually asked what windows media player, not windows media player itself. Pretty confusing I know. Since I am a failure at English I am not sure if there is any punctuation to fix that but. What media player for windows is the question they were originally asking. Not that it mattered the question itself was futile.
RainMotorsports said:
They actually asked what windows media player, not windows media player itself. Pretty confusing I know. Since I am a failure at English I am not sure if there is any punctuation to fix that but. What media player for windows is the question they were originally asking. Not that it mattered the question itself was futile.
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For blu rays, I am aware of 2 media players that can play them. PowerDVD and TotalMedia Theater. There may be more, but those are the 2 main ones. They are not free though, but that is because the codecs are still proprietary. I'm not sure if they will ever be open-source, but if that happens, just about every media player such as VLC or Media Player Classic will be able to decode and play blu rays. I use PowerDVD personally.
PowerDVD and TotalMedia Theater will play blu-rays. I use both AnyDVD HD (slysoft) and DVDFab HD Decrypter to rip to PC hard-drive. Rippers remove HDCP. Once ripped both Plex and Tversity can stream blu-rays. Also, the new VLC Player(free) that just came out can play and stream blu-rays as well. Plex streamer uses up 90% CPU on the PC when streaming and is most reliable at full 1080P. However, Tversity only uses 3% CPU when streaming has the best video quality and should be converted if streaming to E4GT. I use islysoft to convert to mp4 at both 800x480 on (4G or wifi) and 320x240 3G to my E4GT in motion in the car. http://dyn.com for $20 per year streams Tversity on PC to the E4GT on any android mobile browser or any browser. I use MX Player Pro on E4GT set to SW Fast when streaming from PC. Once in the blu-ray realm for quality and reliablity it does cost. Best free option is DVDFab HD Decrypter and VLC v2.0.1. Some Laptops only have VGA - in this case you need an up converter to digital HDMI 1080P.
I have both a laptop and a desktop. I use my desktop to stream because I have 2 TB of space on my desktop. My laptop is my work horse. It is the machine I use to get all my report done with. I don't want to eat up all of my hard drive space with a DVD's but maybe investing in an 2 TB or more external hard-drive might solve that problem in the future this would be a good solution because it would make my media portable. I have some cartoons, music and anime I currently stream from my desktop computer. How much hard-drive space does a typical blue ray movie takes up. My currently solution right now is to use a hdmi cable I also own FAB DVD as well.
jamice4u said:
I have both a laptop and a desktop. I use my desktop to stream because I have 2 TB of space on my desktop. My laptop is my work horse. It is the machine I use to get all my report done with. I don't want to eat up all of my hard drive space with a DVD's but maybe investing in an 2 TB or more external hard-drive might solve that problem in the future this would be a good solution because it would make my media portable. I have some cartoons, music and anime I currently stream from my desktop computer. How much hard-drive space does a typical blue ray movie takes up. My currently solution right now is to use a hdmi cable I also own FAB DVD as well.
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Blu-Rays are 28GB to 50GB depending the length of the movie. 40 to 65 Full Blu-Ray movies will fit in 2TB of storage. I have both Roku and Seagate Streamers. You can use Seagate Theater or Goflex streamer and the USB drive can be used to play ripped blu-rays in original format. However, the Seagate remote is not great. Roku can play ripped blu-rays streamed from your PC with the Plex media server on the PC and the Plex plug-in on Roku. However, Rokus USB input the movies need to be converted to mp4 only when played off USB harddrive. If you have Directv box Tversity v1.8 on PC can stream converted mp4 movies thru your directv box using media stream. The point is a good converter like iSkysoft to mp4 the universal format is a good investment.
of course you should try this
jamice4u said:
I am currently loving streaming my video content onto my Samsung T.V. which includes watching youtube onto my big screen T.V. from Samsung Epic Touch 4g. But now I want to stream my blue ray dvds onto my big screen t.v. I know XDA is full of knowledgeable tech geeks. Thank you for helping me out.
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Click to collapse
of course, you should try this, I have used it for almost 2 years.it never had any problem。it plays blu ray on pc smoothly。when i bought it, to my surprise, it can change region code, thus i'm never worried about relaxing myself when on business. It's an easy to use and professional blu ray player software for windows， including Windows 8. of course, it fully integrates with Windows Media Center too. beyond your surprise, it's also a 3d video player. maybe you should try. believe me, it is satisfying
On my Note 2 I can share a video playing in the default video player to my xbox 360 but when playing a video obtained through Samsung's video hub there is no icon to share it to the xbox (the little monitor icon with arrows and a number).
Has anyone got a solution to this problem?
I have this problem too, did you find a solution?
It seems to let me play trailers but when I want to watch a full film there is no icon.
I've not found a solution. I think it's due to DRM though...
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DRM? What was your solution? I am guessing I should be able to stream the full movies and not just the trailers. Really confusing how it works for the trailers and not the full movies.
DRM is digital rights management. You can't steam it because you've rented it and you do not own it. The only solution I found is to download from other (dodgy) sources lol
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Does anyone know of an app that will play media from a network share? Ive tried Diceplayer and it doesnt seem to support mkvs... If I can find an app that will stream media off my local shares, this will finally be my "one box to rule them all" as it supports all the services Im interested in, I just want to be able to stream my local media. I DONT want to use Plex or XBMC.. I have a Plex server running and it runs great however I have a catch all folder where downloaded stuff goes before I move it into whatever directory its going to live in and thats the content I want to be able to play.
Anyone got any suggestions?
MadFlava said:
Does anyone know of an app that will play media from a network share? Ive tried Diceplayer and it doesnt seem to support mkvs... If I can find an app that will stream media off my local shares, this will finally be my "one box to rule them all" as it supports all the services Im interested in, I just want to be able to stream my local media. I DONT want to use Plex or XBMC.. I have a Plex server running and it runs great however I have a catch all folder where downloaded stuff goes before I move it into whatever directory its going to live in and thats the content I want to be able to play.
Anyone got any suggestions?
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Try archos media player. I haven't tried it yet but it supports SMB. If you come across anything better, let me know
Well, its not an all in one solution, but...
Install VLC for Android and ES file explorer.
In ES file explorer when you try and open an MKV it will ask what app you want to use. tell it VLC and you are in.
The bad news is that the beta of VLC does not appear to support any controls on the Fire remote. It will take
"mouse" command from the cheap MCE remote that people are using as an InfraRed receiver.
Is there a reason XBMC is out? It can be setup to just show your movies and shows without doing any scraping or anything other then just letting you get to your network shares and play it.
I haven't had the greatest luck with XBMC. Ive set it up on numerous devices and its probably that I just end up getting frustrated with it. I ran it naively back in my original Xbox but now I just cant seem to get a handle on seeing it up to my liking. Plex has been great but I don't think my server has enough Wheaties to handle maybe more than 2 streams which is why I've been looking for something to just stream content across the network.
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You should try Vimu Player. You won't even have to sideload it is in the fire tv store.
I haven't tried it on the fire tv but I used to use it a lot on my Logitech Revue Google Tv. It doesn't have all the features of xbmc or plex but it did a great job streaming video from my NAS.
skinnydev said:
You should try Vimu Player. You won't even have to sideload it is in the fire tv store.
I haven't tried it on the fire tv but I used to use it a lot on my Logitech Revue Google Tv. It doesn't have all the features of xbmc or plex but it did a great job streaming video from my NAS.
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Ill give it a shot. I have Plex set up and it works great for me. But I have kids and they want to stream stuff too and Im concerned that my media server isnt going to have the Wheaties to stream that much stuff so the option of being able to play directly from the share is what Im after. My Plex server is an Athlon Phenom II X3 with 16GB of RAM.. really doesnt do anything but run Plex, SabNZB and PlayOn..
Thanks for the heads up!
I use MX Player and Skifta on my android devices to access my DLNA server. So you can give MX Player a try it handles mkvs perfectly fine.
Vimu looks like it has a lot of potential but sadly most of my MKV files dont have sound and I cant really find any settings to change for that. Im going to give MX Player a shot now.. I dont know if thats DLNA only but if it is, thats not what Im looking for. I just want to be able to stream without transcoding on the server side.
MX Player isn't DLNA only it can handle other network streams just fine as long as you know what they are.
DLNA is just happens to be how I push my media files around the house to my devices.
Yea.. I looked at it and couldnt find a way to browse to shares... Im using a Mede8r for playing from network shares right now.. Im so close to being able to ditch everything except the FireTV.. if I could find a good network player that just plays, I could get rid of all my other boxes. I really want the "one box to rule them all" thing......
Try using es file explorer to browse to the share and ND for playback?
Montisaquadeis said:
Try using es file explorer to browse to the share and ND for playback?
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I had issues with ES working with the Amazon remote. Are you using an external keyboard/mouse to control it?
Personally I do not have a Fire TV. Just trying to help out is all.
A keyboard and mouse should work fine. Even an air mouse should be ok as well if you want to go that route.
I'm really surprised that Qloud Media doesn't get more attention. You install it as a server on either Windows or Mac, point it at your media and that's it.
Run the client on Android, iOS or Windows devices, plug in the server PIN and you're off. Done and done.
The video is transcoded on the fly, so streaming over the internet results in a lower-quality image at times, but it's certainly watchable.
The GUI isn't fancy, but quite functional. The server end has almost no bells and whistles. You could think of it as Plex-ultra-lite, so there's no overhead processing going on. The server exists only to serve media and that's all. No indexing of your collection, no downloading cover images, etc. It just streams media from whatever source you choose and I haven't had any problems streaming anything in my collection, even .mkv files encoded with AC3 audio that the Chromecast won't touch.
I just loaded the client up to my new FTV last night and again, it works perfectly.
The only minor drawback is that the aspect ratio is a bit weird when viewed on the FTV. It's not perfectly 16:9 but more like 15:9, so the image is a bit squished in from the sides. You don't really notice it after a few minutes though.
Im surprised it's 6 months later and there is still no easy way of playin network shared files, say from a NAS device with a media server, on a Fire TV without having to sideload an app. If I'm wrong please correct me. I did try ViMu but it couldn't play any of my files (mostly MP4s) - everyone said it was unable to play. Currently I use an XBox 360 to browse/watch videos, which I have fairly organized into folders. Why is this so difficult? My Sony TV has a player but it doesn't support folders so its hundreds of videos just in alphabetical order by filename which isn't ideal- plus you can only read the first few characters of the file name without looking at a detailed view so no way to tell what specific file you're looking at if they all start with the same word.
Yes I tried XMBC but it's way overkill, I don't need or want custom artwork per file, it crashes, and it's also not something I can put in the regular fite tv menu. Also XMBC doesn't play 720p content full screen for some reason.
Has anyone had better luck?
Edit ---------------------------
Well after some more trial and error I ended up using Llama to auto start XBMC in place of some other random app so I basically have XMBC on my main Fire TV screen. I also deleted all XBMC data and didn't run any file scrapers this time, and only access files via the Windows Network Share, so it is a much cleaner looking interface like I wanted. Finally the screen size issue was actually the entire Fire TV screen size which I had to enlarge in the Fire TV Display settings. Even maxed out it doesn't 100% fill the screen but it's much closer, I can live with it. Although I didn't bring it up I was also having an issue with the time display I was blaming on XMBC but was again the Fire TV itself was set to Pacific time- you'd think Amazon would have set the timezone right.
Anyway I feel it's much than it was earlier- still occasional crashes on XBMC but not too bad. Just wish I didn't was a few dollars downloading paid apps that didn't work as I thought they were supposed to.
If XBMC is crashing, consider trying SPMC (fork of XBMC). Its available in the Amazon app store (but for the Stick it must be side loaded).
I'm using it on my FTV Stick, and its been solid. No crashes or hangs.
Does anyone know why my MX Player stop playing on my one box it's saying cannot play link it's on my firestick on TV
back ground... For years I have used the native file play back capibilities of my LG BD390 and LG BD570 bluray players to connect to windows file shares, and play back video files (AVI, Mp4, MKV, M2TS and others). Basically, I setup a shared folder on my PC, put my media files in it, and used the menu on the BD's to connect to the share and play the file. No DLNA, no transcoding on the fly, etc.
I want to add that ability, along with netflix and amazon instant video, in two other rooms, but all the bluray players I can buy locally use DLNA now. There are some I can get mail order, but they are more expensive too.
If it matters, most of my MKV's were made using BD-Rebuilder or VideoReDo TVSuite. Some do have DTS, others DD5.1. The M2TS files were made using my Sony HDR-SR11 HiDef camcorder and my Hauppauge HD PVR (1212).
Output would be HDMI to a TV. If it works well enough, I'd get one for the basement too (where I'd hook it to a receiver via optical audio).
I know the Fire TV can be setup to do Amazon Instant and Netflix. But can it be setup to replace the BD's (minus bluray/dvd playback of course). To play those files without having to transcode, or use a DLNA server too? Could I possibly use Rhapsody too?
KidJoe said:
back ground... For years I have used the native file play back capibilities of my LG BD390 and LG BD570 bluray players to connect to windows file shares, and play back video files (AVI, Mp4, MKV, M2TS and others). Basically, I setup a shared folder on my PC, put my media files in it, and used the menu on the BD's to connect to the share and play the file. No DLNA, no transcoding on the fly, etc.
I want to add that ability, along with netflix and amazon instant video, in two other rooms, but all the bluray players I can buy locally use DLNA now. There are some I can get mail order, but they are more expensive too.
If it matters, most of my MKV's were made using BD-Rebuilder or VideoReDo TVSuite. Some do have DTS, others DD5.1. The M2TS files were made using my Sony HDR-SR11 HiDef camcorder and my Hauppauge HD PVR (1212).
Output would be HDMI to a TV. If it works well enough, I'd get one for the basement too (where I'd hook it to a receiver via optical audio).
I know the Fire TV can be setup to do Amazon Instant and Netflix. But can it be setup to replace the BD's (minus bluray/dvd playback of course). To play those files without having to transcode, or use a DLNA server too? Could I possibly use Rhapsody too?
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The Fire TV currently does not natively support playing videos of any sort from a shared PC folder. I am not aware of any "official" apps that do it either. By "official" I mean apps you can download from the Amazon appstore which display traditionally in the Fire TV "app" section. That said, there is XBMC (xbmc.org). XBMC runs beautifully on the Fire TV. You have to sideload the app, which is a simple process and does not involve rooting. The biggest disadvantage to XBMC over an "official" app or native solution is how you have to launch XBMC on the Fire TV. Instead of just going to the "Apps" section on the home screen, you have to dig down into a few menus. Specifically, you have to (from the homescreen) navigate to Settings > Applications > XBMC > Launch. It's a minor inconvenience, but it's worth mentioning. There are ways to make launching XBMC easier, but they are a bit of a hack involving other sideloaded android apps.
With XBMC you can do everything your BD players could do. HDMI and Optical audio are available on the Fire TV. Multiple options for getting to your media over the network are available. No transcoding or DLNA necessary. MKV's play fine. DTS and DD5.1 get passed through correctly. I've never tried M2TS files myself, but I would be surprised if XBMC couldn't play them. If you provide me a link to a M2TS file, I'd be happy to try it out for you. There is no official Rhapsody app. You can sideload the Rhapsody app for Android, but you will have to use a mouse & keyboard plugged into the Fire TV to use it. I would expect Rhapsody will make a Fire TV app eventually since they already have a Kindle Fire app.
@fireTVnews.com thank you for the reply. Sorry I got a little side tracked.
it sounds very tempting
Samba player
Another apps are (sideloading only):
Dice Player - very nice, but has no good support of FireTV remote.
File Manager HD + MX Player - 2 apps, that's only minus.
I'm looking for app recommendations.
Ever since I began using devices to stream internet video content to my TV, I've been looking for this.
I want an app that will run on AFTV (I'm rooted and can sideload etc) in which I can easily subscribe to a bunch of video netcasts, and then have a playlist with all of them in chronological order when I want to sit down and watch them, preferably streamed. The key requirement here that is eluding me is the playlist of episodes from all of my subscriptions.
I used BeyondPod for audio netcasts on my phone. I've used it on my Nexus also, but it was slow and clunky on the AFTV and difficult to control with the AFTV Remote or with a keyboard+touchpad.