MMM music solutions

[slugsworth]

I know there have been some related threads, but rather than hijack them I figured I would ask my question here.

I used to both stream music and play most of my own music from my early '00's stereo via an old laptop - that laptop died and I would rather remove my laptop from the media role if at all possible.  In addition to music, it would be great if I could watch the occasional hulu, and flip through photo's from my storage on the tv.  I'm a little lost in the technology, but have considered getting a network drive to store my music and or getting a roku, fire device, chomecast or something else.  Plex looks like it might be the answer to what I'm looking for.

Any advice is welcome.

[Scandium]

A NAS box and a roku or chromecast sounds like it would do what you want. The roku 4 is out soon ($130?) or I've see the older roku 3 for $70 now. Chromecast is of course the cheapest at $35, but I'm not a huge fan of having to use my phone as a remote. Although for music that might actually be better for search etc. I think all these support plex. I've tried plex in my PS3 and it didn't work great, but I think the roku app should be better..

A bit unmustachian, but I got two Sonos 1s on black friday last year and it's a great, hassle-free network music player.

Interested to hear other options.

[RyanAtTanagra]

I use a raspberry pi with a usb hard drive plugged into it that has all my music/photos/movies, hooked up to my stereo+tv via hdmi.

I use OpenELEC on the pi, which runs XBMC (called Kodi now) and I believe can do Hulu/Netflix as well (I don't have an account for either).

I love this current setup, and it's pretty cheap and easy to get going.