[mythtv-users] Free Linux alternative to PlayOn?

[Brian Wood]

On Friday 18 September 2009 07:27:28 David Brieck Jr. wrote:
> I'll let you know how this goes, but I just got a Wii for our house and I'm
> planning on trying out PlayOn in a Windows virtual machine. They have the
> 14 day trial so I'm willing to give it a shot.
> I've been looking for a good opensource package that will work with Hulu,
> but Boxee (http://www.boxee.tv) has never been able to play Hulu
> consistently good for me (audio problems, lockups, etc), plus they seem to
> only support the most recent Ubuntu release which is terrible for someone
> who never upgrades.
>
> I'm willing to pay $20 to PlayOn if it keeps me from wasting 40 hours
> trying to get a "free" package to work and never succeeding. Yeah the whole
> windows thing sucks, but if I can get it going in a VM at least I don't
> have any additional hardware costs.

It's working for me in a VM under VirtualBox. VirtualBox is running on a 
quad-Opteron (2x275s) machine with 16GB of RAM, using Debian Etch as the host 
OS.

It's hard to blame the Playon folks for concentrating on Windows, there are 
far fewer Linux users, and a lot of them do not want to pay for anything, or 
do not want to run non-free (as in libre) software.

I've not tried a Wii, but it works well with an XBox-360, PS3 and a D-Link 
DSM-520. Basically any UPnP/DLNA player should work, though things like 
shuttling performance, thumbnail display and how much of the metadata will 
display will depend on the player itself.

As commercial software goes, I think PlayON is a bargain for the price.

The many available plugins, and the ease of creating your own, make it very 
extensible.

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org