Home stereo
Sep. 20th, 2013 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elizillaI now have 21st century media stuff! I have attached a Roku to my living room stereo. I had to buy a small TV to use with it, since the Roku has no display of its own, but this seems to be true of every such device that people use today - apparently no one does this without a TV in the mix anymore. So I bought the smallest TV I could find, that didn't carry a premium price for the smallness. I have to laugh that the TV I needed to display Roku menus, cost twice what the Roku itself did. It's like heated grips for the motorcycle, where the controllers cost more than the heaters.
I installed the Plex Media Server on my computer, and now I can play my locally stored MP3 files to my home stereo, with a much nicer interface than my old Omnifi used. This was my main goal and it is accomplished. As a bonus, D was able to pair the Roku with her Netflix account, so she can watch her shows in the kitchen if she wants to.
One funny thing is that the Roku connects to the TV with a connector that is basically an RCA red / white audio, plus a third yellow plug that carries the video. The cord that came with the Roku had these things all so tightly tied together, they had to go to the three side by side ports on the TV. Then I had to get a mini-din to RCA connecter to link the TV's headphone jack to the stereo. And my music sounded kinda distorted. So I cut the stop off the three-cable thing, and peeled the yellow away from the red and white. I plugged the yellow into the TV and the red and white straight to the stereo. Works great, less distortion.
The Plex Media Server went out on the internet and downloaded album covers for most of what is in my collection, and short bios for the artists. The Roku displays them on the TV while the music plays. It's kinda cool! Plex didn't work as well for matching artist bios and album covers to the ones that I ripped from vinyl, though, so I think it's getting a lot of this info from online databases rather than from my ID3 tags. It also was absolutely determined to change the artist name on "Bridge Over Troubled Water", to "Simon and Garfunkel's" and this is not anywhere that I can find it in my ID3 tags. So I spent some time figuring out how to manually correct Plex, and feed it pictures and bios where they are missing.
But it hates compilation CDs, and I have a lot of them. It puts up these screens where it whines about how I need to change the ID3 tags on all the tracks. Maybe someday when I am really bored I will do that. If I can even figure out how to make it happy. I tried fixing one compilation CD's ID3 tags and it made the errors go away but it still can't find the album covers. I guess no one uploads the covers for compilations.
In the meantime, I have split my tracks into two libraries. One that has good covers and artwork, and one that's full of whiny error screens and generic "various artist" graphics.
I installed the Plex Media Server on my computer, and now I can play my locally stored MP3 files to my home stereo, with a much nicer interface than my old Omnifi used. This was my main goal and it is accomplished. As a bonus, D was able to pair the Roku with her Netflix account, so she can watch her shows in the kitchen if she wants to.
One funny thing is that the Roku connects to the TV with a connector that is basically an RCA red / white audio, plus a third yellow plug that carries the video. The cord that came with the Roku had these things all so tightly tied together, they had to go to the three side by side ports on the TV. Then I had to get a mini-din to RCA connecter to link the TV's headphone jack to the stereo. And my music sounded kinda distorted. So I cut the stop off the three-cable thing, and peeled the yellow away from the red and white. I plugged the yellow into the TV and the red and white straight to the stereo. Works great, less distortion.
The Plex Media Server went out on the internet and downloaded album covers for most of what is in my collection, and short bios for the artists. The Roku displays them on the TV while the music plays. It's kinda cool! Plex didn't work as well for matching artist bios and album covers to the ones that I ripped from vinyl, though, so I think it's getting a lot of this info from online databases rather than from my ID3 tags. It also was absolutely determined to change the artist name on "Bridge Over Troubled Water", to "Simon and Garfunkel's" and this is not anywhere that I can find it in my ID3 tags. So I spent some time figuring out how to manually correct Plex, and feed it pictures and bios where they are missing.
But it hates compilation CDs, and I have a lot of them. It puts up these screens where it whines about how I need to change the ID3 tags on all the tracks. Maybe someday when I am really bored I will do that. If I can even figure out how to make it happy. I tried fixing one compilation CD's ID3 tags and it made the errors go away but it still can't find the album covers. I guess no one uploads the covers for compilations.
In the meantime, I have split my tracks into two libraries. One that has good covers and artwork, and one that's full of whiny error screens and generic "various artist" graphics.
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no subject
Date: 2013-09-20 10:24 pm (UTC)This is all presuming that the TV doesn't have an HDMI input (the ROKU should support HDMI). One nice thing about HDMI cables is that they carry both audio and video. So, you could connect that to the TV, and all the RCA cables over to the stereo.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-21 12:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-21 12:30 am (UTC)-B
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Date: 2013-09-21 03:23 pm (UTC)Does the ROKU have an optical SPDIF output? You can now buy a reasonably-priced external DAC that would let you use that. But that really would be overkill for your set-up. I mention the SPDIF output more for if you should ever decide to upgrade the stereo, you might look for one with an SPDIF input.
Oh, and now my brain is spinning down that path: you obnviously need some Magnepan wall-mount speakers. To frame the Cat Nebula art. You've already got the box for running the speaker wires up there, right?
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Date: 2013-09-23 11:29 am (UTC)-B