So I have been using my old XBox360 as a media player in the living room (the basement has my LG Plasma SmartTV which has all the apps I need) for a while, for a few reasons:

  1. It is 1080p, and so is my TV.
  2. It is easy on my eyes and has good color saturation.
  3. No, really just 1 & 2.

Problem is, Plex dropped official support for that unit in 2017 - and my server finally got updated to a place where the XB360 client just won't play movies any more. I can probably downgrade the server a couple revs (they come out weekly) and hold it there ... for a bit ... but it's time to replace it as a media player.

These things are so cheap and so ubiquitous - what do you guys use? My wife has a Roku (a tiny one that plugs direct into the HDMI port, I have to look up which generation) that that she brought with her when she moved in. I've never really liked it, some apps induce eyestrain and some don't.

Are Fire Sticks ok? Fire TV full size? Older Roku? I need something that still has app support but won't make my eyes hurt, we don't watch a lot of TV but we DO watch a lot of series/movies on:

  • Plex
  • Amazon Prime Video
  • Netflix
  • Youtube

Thoughts?

  • diop replied to this.

    Gurm I'm facing the same dilemma actually and am a fellow Plex user.

    I've tried the latest Plex desktop client and PMP but both give me a bit of strain, it seems a little 'harsh' compared to older versions.

    Maybe try Kodi+Plex add-on? You might be able to use an older version of Kodi with comfortable rendering. Obviously this is really only for HTPC use. I have given up on using Plex on Smart TV's and smartphones because of the obvious (we can't use them!).

    It's all or nothing, really. Any online, App-based service like Netflix/Plex et al are going to inevitably want it's userbase to upgrade and update. Also FWIW I can't use any TV sticks or Roku etc, as I'm certain they're running some form of Linux behind it (instant strain like dithering). I even tried a WD HDTV live from 2009 era but even that was uncomfortable.

    At least in my situation, Desktop/HTPC or nothing for now 🙁.

    • KM likes this.

      Sunspark I of course ... could. XB360 can even natively browse SMB/CIFS shares. But I've got hundreds of hours of config sunk into Plex, and it's a badass transcoder. I watch it on my phone, the LG SmartTV, at work... everywhere really.

          Gurm Serviio and some others are also good transcoders. My perspective is that it is better to try a new open-source software on a known decent device than to jump immediately to something new and not know whether it is hardware or software.
          I never liked Plex interface and setup. When I ran stuff like this I ran primarily the old ps3mediaserver. It's pretty obsolete now and there is a fork, but I had it setup just so.

            a year later

            What is your current media player of choice?

            I have tried lots of different players and all seem to cause issues to varying degrees. The latest VLC/MPC-HC/Pot Player/Kodi etc cause strain. The only player that seems most comfortable for me is MPC-HC (2010 build with XP renderer selected) or Windows Media Player (however you need to convert to MP4/codec pack for use with some formats).

            I was thinking of using an all in one player like PowerDVD, or something that supports H264/MPEG-2/XVID and disc playback. I have tried PowerDVD 2018/2019 and even on my good setup it gave eye strain. I suspect modern rendering/decoders in these players are to blame.

            Another unusual player I can recommend is Edge browser. It has built in H264 support, you do need to convert to MP4 for playback to work and I don't think it supports subtitles, but I found it to be reasonably comfortable. Strangely, when comparing two windows side-by-side, one of a YouTube video and another of the same video downloaded as MP4, the whites seem slightly brighter/yellower on the local file compared to YouTube itself. There must be something happening behind the scenes on local playback which doesn't happen during streaming.

              diop For Android/Android TV it's VLC for me. Kodi's output does something that makes my eyes hurt after a while. Though it also seems to depend on the video file that is played. I think some video files display triggering flicker due to their encoding. But overall VLC seems much better at playing a majority of files with no symptoms appearing.

              Not sure about Windows or other operating systems.

                2 months later

                diop Legacy or new Edge?

                Also what is the exact build of MPC-HC and where did you get it? Many thanks

                    degen Probably legacy edge on the EdgeHTML engine which is still used for W10 apps from the store even though MS yanked out end-user access to the browser itself in 20H2. IE 11 is still available as a browser though and renders similarly to blink comfort-wise, albeit almost entirely unusable as a browser for anything else. It will work just fine still for amazon and netflix streaming if you want to use the browser web interface, and there is a setting that you can set in 'new edge' (Blink engine) preferences to stop MS from yanking you out of ie11 when they see you going to netflix on it. Eventually though IE11 will probably get killed since this is software as a service and probably eventually apps from the store will have the engine changed from EdgeHTML to Blink but neither is soon.

                        Sunspark Internet Explorer is so comfortable for streaming! It will be a sad day when it stops working for this purpose. I tihnk SIlverlight is out of support soon. Maybe the streaming sites will pull the plug then.

                          degen Legacy or new Edge?

                          Also what is the exact build of MPC-HC and where did you get it? Many thanks

                          New Edge. I actually abandoned using it for media playback though. Strangely I find it perfect for YouTube but local files introduce some discomfort.

                          MPC-HC build is 1.5.0.2827 - It's not perfect but 99%.

                          Another option could be to get an old games console. I have a PS2 slim running FMCB with SMS, a homebrew media player. It supports xvid/mpeg2 and mp3/FLAC playback. The PS2 also doubles it's use as a DVD Player. It's not ideal if you have an extensive Blu-Ray collection, however any video format can be converted to xvid for playback on older tech. It's a slightly laborious process but a small price to pay for comfortable viewing. An Xbox with XBMC is another option.

                          I stopped relying on streaming services some time ago because of these issues.

                              diop Great! Are you using VMR7 or overlay mixer? I am using VMR7 with DirectVobSub and it seems way more comfortable than modern players. Oh and does windowed vs renderless VMR make a difference? Thanks for your help.

                              I do have a large Blu-ray collection, so using this older MPC-HC with AnyDVD is ideal, so much better than the PowerDVD player (which is painful nowadays).

                                  degen Great! Are you using VMR7 or overlay mixer? I am using VMR7 with DirectVobSub and it seems way more comfortable than modern players. Oh and does windowed vs renderless VMR make a difference? Thanks for your help.

                                  I do have a large Blu-ray collection, so using this older MPC-HC with AnyDVD is ideal, so much better than the PowerDVD player (which is painful nowadays).

                                  I've been using VMR-9 (Renderless) which seems pretty stable. Subtitles seem to cause the picture to lag a little for me every time they refresh, but there may be ways around that by using different filters. It's not perfect but it's the most comfortable player I've found. Also if you're not using a 24p capable device, I'd recommend Reclock. It will speed up 24fps content to 25fps. Set your monitor to 50hz and you should get smooth playback. It does speed the audio pitch up slightly but there is a toggle to pitch it back to normal after the speedup.

                                  You could also go the Kodi route to organise your media too. I tried a while back to do this, Kodi allows you to select an external player to launch content, this also worked with Plex+Kodi (IIRC), but I don't think it tracked your progress if you're halfway through an episode for example.

                                    On my Windows 7 partition I use 1.7.10 with the madVR video renderer (and have been the whole time) set for D3D9 exclusive mode (not D3D11) and sanear for the audio renderer.

                                    Windows 10 I am still testing different methods out.

                                    4 days later

                                    I'm currently pleasantly surprised by the native Films & TV W10 built-in app (named Movies & TV in some localizations). If you look closely, it actually has both better colour and contrast rendering than VLC even after you manually fiddle with VLC's image adjust filter. Another plus is that it doesn't need as much battery power for playback. It is not a 1-stop replacement however, because there are codecs and features that other apps have that this one doesn't, but if you load up on free codecs (from Microsoft) in the Windows app store it'll take you most of the way. Unfortunately the DTS audio codec is not one of them, so you will still need other apps like VLC. To adjust caption size/colour, go into system settings>ease of access. You'll be able to change the settings there. Effects are currently broken so it'll just be flat subtitles so I recommend using yellow as the colour.

                                    I played around with mpv as well, it's alright, but it was designed for command-line flags and a keyboard interface. I hate the bare-bones front-end interface someone slapped together for it. SMPlayer uses mpv I believe, but I didn't bother testing it since I was testing the mpv directly and I'm much more familiar with VLC.

                                    Haven't yet tested MPC-HC/BE and the various renderers and decoding methods in the W10 environment. Not a huge rush because I dual-boot.

                                    Seems that MS will remove Legacy Edge from Windows 10 completely instead of just hiding it in April cumulative update (I had uninstalled Chromium Edge in 20H2 with some powershell command I found, in order to make Legacy Edge visible again). And as you said the rendering engine will still be available to Store apps.

                                    3 months later

                                    Currently using clsid2 fork of MPC-HC:
                                    https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases
                                    and windows built-in Movies & TV app.
                                    Pretty happy with both of them.

                                    Another interesting option is Potplayer with so called Motion Blur effect, which is basically frame interpolation.
                                    It makes playback so much smoother for me and definitely easier to focus on.

                                    10 days later

                                    So while it isn’t perfect, my eyes have adjusted well to a first generation amazon fire tv. The flat square one. It’s still supported and gets firmware updates and runs all the software I need.

                                    I played around with MPC-BE as mentioned and added in a few more renderers to play with. Interesting, but I'm not actually using that player at the present time.

                                    Still using MPC-HC (last pre-clsid2 version) but I did tune it to work well with my Windows 10 setup (broadwell cpu, intel hd 6000 graphics) which required different settings than what I was using on Windows 7.

                                    On Windows 10:
                                    -LAV video decoder set to DXVA2 copy-back and the hardware device specifically selected to be the 6000.
                                    -In MadVR renderer (I did test all the other renderers and setting changes as well) but I like MadVR. In it, on the rendering general settings tab all unchecked except for only "enable windowed overlay (Windows 7 and newer)", dithering settings unchecked "use colored noise" (using ordered dithering with it), exclusive mode settings to 3 for video frames presented in advance and windowed mode settings unchecked "present several frames in advance" and backbuffers set to 3.
                                    -For scaling algorithms, DXVA2 for upscaling and downscaling, and for chroma, bicubic 60 anti-ringing.

                                    I have other setting changes of course, but those are the main ones that I found gave me a "smoother" video experience on W10. W10 doesn't have a true exclusive mode anymore. I tested everything.. DX11, etc. Different graphic cards will respond better to different settings, but on my integrated older GPU with the video drivers I'm on, these were the settings that were good for fluidity.

                                    3 years later

                                    diop diop, I also have a PS2 with FMCB and OPL which I play on a Hisense LED TV.

                                    Do you play on a CRT?

                                    I'm not really sure about this, but it might be possible to do 1:1 rips of DVDs as mpeg2 files and then play them over an ethernet cable connected to the PS2. I think this might look better on a CRT TV, however.

                                    EDIT: Do you use your PS2 with composite or component cables? I have the HD Retrovision component cables but they give me a headache on my LED TV, so I just use composite which look very good anyway.

                                      dev