Dune Prices GOING UP!!!

In the same store where you bought it?

What is amazing is that after 18 months prices have not dropped for the Smart series

This has been planned for a while

http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2011...-on-the-dunes/

WOW. Looks like I bought my D1 in time last week.

Everyting is going to get more expensive in the next weeks.

With the cost of oil increasing, transportation/shipping is going to force prices up.

Anything that needs energy to be manufactured, moved around, or uses any type of hydrocarbon to be made, like plastic, is going to cost more. Which means pretty much any thing we touch day or night. Businesses won't be able to sustain the rapped increase in energy, materials, and transportation costs and keep prices where they've been. It's going to get passed on to the consumer. Watch what happens to food prices in the next weeks.

It will be hard for them to sell anything with high prices like that. Specially when TV's are doing more and more.

That is true but every since we bought an LG Smart TV with Plex our media player use has dropped perhaps 80%. In fact most of the players got sold. Now, we aren't into HD audio and BluRay so that may not be your typical avsforum user's experience. If one is willing to compromise on video and/or audio quality in order to gain other advantages then media players become less useful. The new Plex Media Server will have DLNA support which opens up an interesting option for PS3 users.

Between low cost silent XBMC HTPC's and Smart TV and devices I would think that the end is coming for most media players.

philip

If Dune gets some competition down the track then you will see the prices plummet.Dune is mass producing now and prices should be dropping now and not going up.I do see shortages of dune players now and then and that could be keeping the prices up too.
If only there was other media players as good and cheaper.
Dune is controlling their market now too.
You could get a dune H1 from china for $235AUD and they have closed off sales there now.

Nah, still think we have a while to even get there. The media player market, at least the folks here, are a bit of a niche and for how many people use their media players there is still a lot missing from SmartTVs/Plex. If the TV/Plex solution offered full media format support (really this would fall back on the TV), proper subtitle support, etc... then it would be worth considering. For now I have no desire to have Plex transcoding (degrading quality) my content just so I can watch on a TV.

It doesn't have to transcode. Dunno about subtitle support. Audio is the missing link on the all XBMC dervied projects including boxee. Plex is super feature rich compared to any standalone player. as always depends which features you care about.

to me the real issue with plex is stability. Its just not stable server or client on MAC,PC, or IOS. I've spent a lot of time trying and XBMC is FAR FAR MORE stable on the same hardware.

Plex is the future if they can get it right, but just like boxee I beleive they will ultimately fail because its WAF is too low. (aka. crashes too much).

Correct, it doesnt have to transcode, but many of the TVs don't have the same type of codec support as the dedicated media players, which means in those cases transcoding will be needed

Agreed and I can't find out how to easily tell other than obvious PQ issues if its transcoding or not without looking at the server CPU load.

I think it would depend if streaming wireless or wired. Wireless (at least on my iOS/Android tablet) there is obvious PQ degradation.

I agree with your sentiments with respect to DLNA. What is interesting is that the Plex Media Server will support DLNA clients such as the PS3. This means that DLNA devices like the PS3 will be able to access Plex. That will mean fewer reasons for people to run out and buy media players.

As far as quality goes, most of us reach a point where the quality is good enough and other considerations, such as portability, ease of use, remote access, etc... become more important.

philip

Are we using the same process? Plex for me almost never crashes ( XBMC Eden is better though as it never does). Plex is weak when it comes to subtitle support on remote devices.

My Plex clients never transcode video. They transcode the audio stream. It depends on the client of course. You can have a look at the Plex Media Server log. It will tell you which video has needed transcoding of both streams.

I am using a Mac as the Plex Media Server. I believe that is more stable than the NAS, Linux or Windows options. Plex for us has a WAF through the roof. I have to force people to use XBMC As far as Google TV and the Roku, they are both lost causes for us ( the Roku is a neat lost cause).

Subtitles and HD audio seems to be the only things keeping a mass exodus from happening from the media players.

The latest Plex Media Server will also feed DLNA clients such as a PS3. If I were the Dunes and PCH's of the world I would be very concerned. Their user base will shrink and hence prices will go up. The low cost media players are already good enough for most people. Given a Plex option, I just don't see a PS3 owner running out to spend $300 on a media player. That leaves the BluRay collectors. They seem to be under attack from all sides. The niche may get uncomfortably small.

philip

Cinavia is the reason die hards will never use the PS3 for serious movie streaming.

all I can say is that I have tried mac and windows extensively. Just watched a movie on the ipad frrom the hotel the other day and client on IOS crashed 3 times during one movie. Thats pretty normal by my standards....

no where near as reliable as my NAS which has never crashed or been rebooted once in over 3 years now. that's reliable. plex is just too easy to crash it seems....

Phil, question on WAF. Can you trim down the main menu. I find it has too much stuff for high WAF. Its very confusing compared to XBMC IMO

I haven't been following up on the Plex situation but does it supporting PS3 soon mean that you can access the Plex UI and your content on the PS3 with metadata and coverart or will it just be a file browser similar to other DLNA clients like TVersity?

I believe/expect you would only get a file browser (via UPnp) unless a dedicated Plex app was created for the PS3 (similar to Roku, etc...)

Gotcha, thanks. The quest continues I guess. I was just over in the AppleTV 3 thread and hopefully once it is jailbroken XBMC will be able to play back full bluray rips and ISOs without downconverting them. The HD audio issue is something I'm a little worried about but since I still have the Dune D1 I can play those movies where sound needs to be at its highest quality for me on it. I really like the XBMC, Plex, WMC type UIs and I don't think I'll be satisfied until I get it. The Dune is rock solid in playback and looks OK with yaDIS but I like all the little touches like the weather, watched indicators, TVTunes, etc. that come with something more involved like XBMC.

The Boxee UI got a lot better since it came out but it still has a lot of bugs and isn't as customizable as I would like so I really want to push it to the bedroom and replace it with something else. I haven't been satisfied with any of the DLNA servers for PS3 so going off what you said I doubt Plex supporting PS3 is what I'm looking for. I really wish HDI would hire some decent UI designers and do a total revamp of their UI including Flash support so that the player could be a little more robust since it does such a damn good job with playback.

All the cheap ARM chips coming out will eventually phase out STB players, Look at the FXI cottoncandy for 199$ its no bigger then a usb stick and can play 1080p they will just keep getting better and the more people port software over to them the more they will get used, They are still a fiddle market only tinker type people are running things like cottoncandy,cubox,raspberry pi at the moment.

Ah that is why. You are using their myplex process which gives you remote access. I have yet to even try that. I use Plex on the ATV2, LG TV and media box, Roku2 and iPhone (locally).

I agree with you with respect to the main menu. That is partly a client issue. There are also different skins, but for the way you and I use it there doesn't appear to be a way to cut down on the clutter. The LG client has less clutter

Great suggestion though. You should make it in the strongest terms to them. That is one reason why XBMC Eden is so nice. It can be tailored quite nicely in that way.

Anyway, when using Plex on a local network I have had very few problems. The myplex solution seems complicated to me and you need to have a proper router or to may certain ports to the server. All seems too much right now. Too many other things to fix ...

philip

Thats just one example. via ATV2 or IPAD1 on local lan I get similar results.

All the ports and stuff are simple and set that up years ago.

I dont use myplex. have no need to look at other stuff. sharing remotely existed in plex long before myplex.

Its just unstable IMO. DVD's with menus seems to causes extra crashes.

Server is OSX 10.6

Strange. We have the same setup but I never have tried to stream dvd's. I assume you mean mkv rips? I didn't think Plex supported video_ts structures. Perhaps m2ts?

On the atv2 it simply rarely crashes. It must have to do with the types of files. Almost all of mine are h.264, aac so it's no big deal, and I don't use their channels.

On my iPod Touch (4) Plex seems to work consistently. Perhaps the iPad1 has memory issues with Plex.

The LG TV ( not the st600) MediaLink (Plex) client has also been very reliable. I wonder if it has to do with the type of audio you are sending. I only use very simple stereo audio. Nothing exotic or modern. Audio seems to be at the source of so many issues one reads about on these forums.

I am truly at a loss. I am not trying to push Plex over say XBMC. I love XBMC Eden on my Shuttle HTPC. It just always works and has great support for subtitles. The design behind Plex makes more sense to me than that behind XBMC. One server and many clients. It's very appealing.

I have 2 Plex Media Servers now. If you think there is clutter with one you'd go wild with 2. On the Mac client I can't seem to hide the server I don't want to use ( I can on the Roku and on the LG I can set the default). The ATV2 client now gives you the option of hiding the server and it also lets you set a default folder to show on the shelf. That's in their latest rc release of the client.

In any case, I don't think your situation is the norm. Something strange is going on. I do think the Plex group is spreading itself a bit thin as they push clients and servers on every device possible. I have seen people complain that they should fix some of the bugs in existing clients before moving on.

The issue must be audio related. Audio seems tricky.

philip