NowTV Box(Roku LT) - £10.00 inc (€11.89) new model £14.99

theteal

Can this be assigned as one of the devices on an existing sky account - like you could with the Xbox up to last month? Or is it just for selling passes to people?

vibe666

BionicRasher wrote: »

But Plex ain't half as good as XBMC

I used XBMC for over 10 years before I switched to plex (when I got the now TV), right back to the days of the original xbox and i've modded at least twenty xboxes for friends and family specifically to use as a media player and have run it on xboxes, desktop pc's, laptops, raspberry pi's, appletv's and many android devices.

if you are one person, with one TV with a few movies and TV shows on a hard drive connected directly to it with a slow internet connection, then xbmc will be of more use to you than plex, but if you have a decent sized, well organised media collection and multiple TV's with a decent internet connection, then xbmc just can't compete, even more so if you sign up to plexpass, functionality wise it's in a different league altogether.

reni10 wrote: »

Plex needs a server running so is not nearly a good as xbmc in that regard!

sorry but that's exactly why plex is better than xbmc.

right now I have my plex server running on a 12 bay NAS, streaming 10tb of movies, tv & music (both on my local network and remotely over the web) to a NowTV, a raspberry Pi, two android tablets, a minix x5 mini, two Android phones, a boxee box and several windows PC's and it does a faster job browsing, searching and playing back that 10tb of media over my LAN on a cheap, crappy NowTV box than xbmc does with even as little as 1tb of media directly from a local hdd on a €100 media player.

with plex, all the heavy lifting is done at the backend, so I can keep the media players as exactly that, which means that the plex client runs just as well with the cheapest device out there (like the nowTV) as it does on more expensive hardware and I can happily browse and play back any of that 10tb of media on any of those devices, transcoded on demand as needed without having to worry about bitrates, encoding format or resolution compatibility issues (even over the web) without any issues, which I used to struggle to do even locally over a wired gigabit network with xbmc on devices costing 20 times what the nowTV does and it was pretty much unusable on any low end device due to how badly xbmc handles large media collections.

vibe666

theteal wrote: »

Can this be assigned as one of the devices on an existing sky account - like you could with the Xbox up to last month? Or is it just for selling passes to people?

you can use an existing sky ID to sign in to the nowTV instead of singing up for a specific nowTV ID, but you will still only get nowTV related content on it (i.e. just your movie, sport or entertainment nowTV passes), it can't be used to get any other sky tv or on-demand content.

salamanca22

vibe666 wrote: »

I used XBMC for over 10 years before I switched to plex (when I got the now TV), right back to the days of the original xbox and i've modded at least twenty xboxes for friends and family specifically to use as a media player and have run it on xboxes, desktop pc's, laptops, raspberry pi's, appletv's and many android devices.

if you are one person, with one TV with a few movies and TV shows on a hard drive connected directly to it with a slow internet connection, then xbmc will be of more use to you than plex, but if you have a decent sized, well organised media collection and multiple TV's with a decent internet connection, then xbmc just can't compete, even more so if you sign up to plexpass, functionality wise it's in a different league altogether.

sorry but that's exactly why plex is better than xbmc.

right now I have my plex server running on a 12 bay NAS, streaming 10tb of movies, tv & music (both on my local network and remotely over the web) to a NowTV, a raspberry Pi, two android tablets, a minix x5 mini, two Android phones, a boxee box and several windows PC's and it does a faster job browsing, searching and playing back that 10tb of media over my LAN on a cheap, crappy NowTV box than xbmc does with even as little as 1tb of media directly from a local hdd on a €100 media player.

with plex, all the heavy lifting is done at the backend, so I can keep the media players as exactly that, which means that the plex client runs just as well with the cheapest device out there (like the nowTV) as it does on more expensive hardware and I can happily browse and play back any of that 10tb of media on any of those devices, transcoded on demand as needed without having to worry about bitrates, encoding format or resolution compatibility issues (even over the web) without any issues, which I used to struggle to do even locally over a wired gigabit network with xbmc on devices costing 20 times what the nowTV does and it was pretty much unusable on any low end device due to how badly xbmc handles large media collections.

Check out the plugin I linked too in the last post. Integrates plex into xbmc.

Anyway even without plex xbmc can do everything plex can do. I have been using xbmc since the xbox days as well and I have all my media on my nas too and xbmc keeps it all up to date as regards metadata and media (cover images and the such)

My media center pc has access to all the media on my NAS as does all my phones, my smart tv and any other device that supports dlna such as the ps3.

I then also have access to a multitude of excellent xbmc plugins and have it highly configured to be the best media experience I have ever had. Plex cannot hold a candle to a properly configured xbmc set up.

BionicRasher

vibe666 wrote: »

I used XBMC for over 10 years before I switched to plex (when I got the now TV), right back to the days of the original xbox and i've modded at least twenty xboxes for friends and family specifically to use as a media player and have run it on xboxes, desktop pc's, laptops, raspberry pi's, appletv's and many android devices.

if you are one person, with one TV with a few movies and TV shows on a hard drive connected directly to it with a slow internet connection, then xbmc will be of more use to you than plex, but if you have a decent sized, well organised media collection and multiple TV's with a decent internet connection, then xbmc just can't compete, even more so if you sign up to plexpass, functionality wise it's in a different league altogether.

sorry but that's exactly why plex is better than xbmc.

right now I have my plex server running on a 12 bay NAS, streaming 10tb of movies, tv & music (both on my local network and remotely over the web) to a NowTV, a raspberry Pi, two android tablets, a minix x5 mini, two Android phones, a boxee box and several windows PC's and it does a faster job browsing, searching and playing back that 10tb of media over my LAN on a cheap, crappy NowTV box than xbmc does with even as little as 1tb of media directly from a local hdd on a €100 media player.

with plex, all the heavy lifting is done at the backend, so I can keep the media players as exactly that, which means that the plex client runs just as well with the cheapest device out there (like the nowTV) as it does on more expensive hardware and I can happily browse and play back any of that 10tb of media on any of those devices, transcoded on demand as needed without having to worry about bitrates, encoding format or resolution compatibility issues (even over the web) without any issues, which I used to struggle to do even locally over a wired gigabit network with xbmc on devices costing 20 times what the nowTV does and it was pretty much unusable on any low end device due to how badly xbmc handles large media collections.

Let's not get into the Plex v XBMC ding dong. Suffice to say that XBMC is far better when set up correctly. Nicer UI, better add-ons, live TV support, open source..... List goes on but each to their own.

You need a powerful backend for Plex whereas it's the opposite for XBMC. Now tv box suits plex down to the ground but to be honest it's all a bit meh for me.

dashcamdanny

vibe666 wrote: »

right now I have my plex server running on a 12 bay NAS, streaming 10tb of movies, tv & music (both on my local network and remotely over the web) to a NowTV, a raspberry Pi, two android tablets, a minix x5 mini, two Android phones, a boxee box and several windows PC's

:eek::eek::eek::eek: That sounds a little excessive.

vibe666

BionicRasher wrote: »

Let's not get into the Plex v XBMC ding dong. Suffice to say that XBMC is far better when set up correctly. Nicer UI, better add-ons, live TV support, open source..... List goes on but each to their own.

You need a powerful backend for Plex whereas it's the opposite for XBMC. Now tv box suits plex down to the ground but to be honest it's all a bit meh for me.

we'll just have to agree to disagree here. xbmc is great for a nice shiny gui and plugins, but what matters for me is my media. i have skyHD, but we barely watch live tv any more other than for kids shows, and there's probably 10 other devices in the house that do a better job of serving up anything that i would have used xbmc plugins for other than scraping metadata on the media collection, which plex does just as well anyway.

with multiple devices, what matters most to me is a centralised media experience with multiple, cheap, lightweight endpoints that can be streamed to both locally and remotely and xbmc can't compete when dealing with a large media collection.

dashcamdanny wrote: »

:eek::eek::eek::eek: That sounds a little excessive.

which bit?

4 TV's in the house, with at least 10 other devices on the LAN capable of streaming content from plex, plus up to another 10 devices connecting remotely at one time or another over 100Mbps FTTH with no usage limit.

a decade ago it was a single xbox connected to a windows desktop with a couple of 20gb hard drives with some movies and TV on, but my collection has grown a lot since then and so has how it's delivered and what it's delivered to.

tdow

Is it possible to load multiple sky sport passes to your account?

I purchased a couple of passes from eBay. I can load one have to option to activate it now or save for later. I would like to load them all and save them for later.

vibe666

yes and no. assuming they work the same as the movie and entertainment passes, you can load multiple passes, but they are just added to your account for the day the previous pass expires, so if you have 3 one day sports passes you get 3 days in a row when you load them, so better to just save them for when you need them.

adox

BionicRasher wrote: »

Let's not get into the Plex v XBMC ding dong. Suffice to say that XBMC is far better when set up correctly. Nicer UI, better add-ons, live TV support, open source..... List goes on but each to their own.

:pac:

BionicRasher

vibe666 wrote: »

we'll just have to agree to disagree here. xbmc is great for a nice shiny gui and plugins, but what matters for me is my media. i have skyHD, but we barely watch live tv any more other than for kids shows, and there's probably 10 other devices in the house that do a better job of serving up anything that i would have used xbmc plugins for other than scraping metadata on the media collection, which plex does just as well anyway.

with multiple devices, what matters most to me is a centralised media experience with multiple, cheap, lightweight endpoints that can be streamed to both locally and remotely and xbmc can't compete when dealing with a large media collection.


which bit?

4 TV's in the house, with at least 10 other devices on the LAN capable of streaming content from plex, plus up to another 10 devices connecting remotely at one time or another over 100Mbps FTTH with no usage limit.

a decade ago it was a single xbox connected to a windows desktop with a couple of 20gb hard drives with some movies and TV on, but my collection has grown a lot since then and so has how it's delivered and what it's delivered to.

The Now TV box is a great addition to my set up (I have 2 of them) and its great as a PLEX client. Its just that we dont have any paid TV service so getting live TV to different TVs in our house is important and the NOW TV is not going to do that. Media Browser 3 might be another option I would look at for the Now TV Box. In the meantime I still use XBMC on my HTPC as its a lot better than PLEX for all sorts of reasons. It also seems to cope very well with my 3.5TB of media and I can access things like Google Play Music and Netflix and all sorts of things on it also.
Its a mish mash really and different things suit different set ups .
The Holy Grail would be 1 system to do the lot for HTPC-live & recorded TV, DVDs, other media, other streaming options (netflix) - stream to inexpensive clients (such as Now TV Box or Chromecast) glitch free, smooth playback. Its not going to happen soon but I do think the Now TV box is a great client box and for €15 its a real bargain

reni10

Sky should charge €2 per day/€10 per week and €32 per month for Sky Sports on NowTV and they would make loads on those prices especially the €2 per day as you would get a lot of people that just want to watch a match that go down to the pub at the moment because they don't want to have the monthly commitment with Sky but for €2 they would just pay and watch their match or other sport at home on NowTV.

Also in the future I think a TV company like Sky should look at just charging €1 per channel per month and let people tailor their TV packages themselves instead of just lumping people with a €30 a month charge when basically they only watch at most about 10 channels which are mostly free to air anyway and the rest are never really looked at.

Kirk Van Houten

reni10 wrote: »

Sky should charge €2 per day/€10 per week and €32 per month for Sky Sports on NowTV and they would make loads on those prices especially the €2 per day as you would get a lot of people that just want to watch a match that go down to the pub at the moment because they don't want to have the monthly commitment with Sky but for €2 they would just pay and watch their match or other sport at home on NowTV.

Also in the future I think a TV company like Sky should look at just charging €1 per channel per month and let people tailor their TV packages themselves instead of just lumping people with a €30 a month charge when basically they only watch at most about 10 channels which are mostly free to air anyway and the rest are never really looked at.

What the Premier League in particular and Sky/BT etc are really missing out on is the pay per view season ticket. They are light years behind the likes of the NFL who will sell you a season ticket for your team to watch all the games on TV. People will pay a premium to watch what really interests them. Not pay a lower premium to watch some of what they want and loads of other stuff they have very little interest in.

Mallagio

Plex on this really turns it into a serious piece of kit.

Mulbert

Is the Sky Sports News HQ channel, a new free unannounced channel app?

Mallagio

Mulbert wrote: »

Is the Sky Sports News HQ channel, a new free unannounced channel app?

You need to have an active Now TV sub to view, very good quality though mind.

NoelJ

Kirk Van Houten wrote: »

What the Premier League in particular and Sky/BT etc are really missing out on is the pay per view season ticket. They are light years behind the likes of the NFL who will sell you a season ticket for your team to watch all the games on TV. People will pay a premium to watch what really interests them. Not pay a lower premium to watch some of what they want and loads of other stuff they have very little interest in.

Its illegal to show Premier League games in the UK at 3pm so I guess it's harder than NFL.

stuchyg

Anyone else's 4od app playing up, now tv working perfectly but 4od won't play more then 15 secs before stopping

bromley52

Mulbert wrote: »

Is the Sky Sports News HQ channel, a new free unannounced channel app?

A 24 hrs sports pass will also allow access for the month.

dashcamdanny

stuchyg wrote: »

Anyone else's 4od app playing up, now tv working perfectly but 4od won't play more then 15 secs before stopping

4od is like that. It plays up terrible. All the time. Problem is usually at the server level.

Kirk Van Houten

NoelJ wrote: »

Its illegal to show Premier League games in the UK at 3pm so I guess it's harder than NFL.

its only illegal due to a decision by the FA.

The Ayatolla

Kirk Van Houten wrote: »

its only illegal due to a decision by the FA.

This.

If they changed that rule they could open up a world of financial opportunities with regards online streams of team's games in HQ.

DubDJ

stuchyg wrote: »

Anyone else's 4od app playing up, now tv working perfectly but 4od won't play more then 15 secs before stopping

I tried it last night for the first time in a few weeks and it kept freezing half way through a program. So it was 15 minutes for me.

bromley52

DubDJ wrote: »

I tried it last night for the first time in a few weeks and it kept freezing half way through a program. So it was 15 minutes for me.

I watched a 25 min show no problem.
I use overplay.net if that makes a difference.

dashcamdanny

4od is unreliable at best. Some nights it works perfect, others its a load of crap.

I hate when it forces you to watch 5 mins of adverts then stops .

stuchyg

I've plugged it out and back in so il try again later to see

Mallagio

The Ayatolla wrote: »

This.

If they changed that rule they could open up a world of financial opportunities with regards online streams of team's games in HQ.

The quality is already out there, I have a plex account with a gut and I get all the 3pms in HD from the states.

Mallagio

The Ayatolla wrote: »

This.

If they changed that rule they could open up a world of financial opportunities with regards online streams of team's games in HQ.

The quality is already out there, I have a plex account with a guy and I get all the 3pms in HD from the states.

IrishStuff09

Finally got around to updating the plugin install video properly

Dozen Wicked Words

Going to get shot of mine I think. Just not getting any use out of it. Internet connection not good enough for now tv (but is OK for netflix and "other" streaming options via other means strangely). Worth the money though, shame it's never going to get fully hacked.