Media Players 101: Why use a Media Player? (Pros and Cons)

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HomerJAU

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Why use a Media Player? (The pros)

Ok. So you already have a DVD-Audio player, SACD Player, Blu-Ray Player or a Universal player (one that plays a combination of formats or all formats). Why do you need a Media Player?

Top 10:

1. Universal Region Free Player: A good Media Player can play all of your HiRez MCH formats (once converted to digital file format), so it's a type of Universal player and can (theoretically) replace your traditional disc players (I have not used my region free Oppo BDP95 DVD/SACD/BD player for over two years - so a Media Player is a more cost effective alternative)

Media Players can ignore region coding in both DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. So you can finally watch and/or listen to that region locked disc you've always wanted or own but can't play due to region or format restrictions. Additionally a good media player will playback video content at its native frame rate so it's not bound by older NTSC/PAL or 60Hz/50Hz encoded HD video either, and most modern TVs will play it all!

Modern Media players are small, low powered, remote controlled devices that can easily fit into an existing equipment rack and you interact with one like you would with a conventional DVD or BD player. It moves file playback away from a personal computer and into your audio/hi-fi rack.

An Intel NUC - small PC with HDMI output, Network (LAN), USB connections and RF remote sensor:

image.jpg


2. Convenience: Most of us have large music collections, for some it's hundreds of discs in various formats (CD to BDA), for others it's thousands including quad LPs and Tapes. Sometimes we may not want to search through our shelves or boxes looking for a title (or even remember what we've bought :)). Or maybe we have a few friends around and want to listen to some great surround hits from various albums. Man, what a pain! Locate a disc, carefully load it, find a track & play it, remove disc! Then Rinse and Repeat...

Once your media is digitised it's in one location (on a hard disc - in your media library). Through the media player interface you can search for an artist, album or track. You can play any album or track in any sequence, almost instantly. Switch from track to track at the touch of a button etc, start/stop/pause, fast forward/rewind etc

Controlled chaos:
cd_racks.jpg



3. Your Music Library is a Backup: Although the process of converting your music discs can be complex (initially) and time consuming, you are actually creating a backup of your precious music discs. Typically your entire collection can be saved to a single hard drive which itself can be backed up. This allows the perfect solution to loss through theft, fire or other such disaster. (Is 'disc rot' an issue with CD, DVDs and BDs?).

Many of our surround discs are extremely rare and have been out of print for many years. Could you replace your collection if it were lost? (Your collection is irreplaceable, right? But do you keep yours in a fire proof vault? You can if its on a hard disc!)


4. Use 'Play List' functionality: We all have favourite tracks we love to hear. Maybe it's the perfect surround mix, it's got great bass extension, it's got beautiful acoustic guitar, remind us of an important thing in our lives or just makes us feel great or emotional. A playlists defines any mix of our tracks or albums that will play sequentially (A list of tracks to play).

A good media player will support three types of playlists:
  • Permanent (saved) - a predefined playlist that you can recall and play at any time
  • 'On the fly' (ad hoc) - randomly add any track or album to a play queue
  • Smart - a predefined 'rules based' playlist (for example: Seventies tracks with a genre of 'Progressive Rock')
Additionally, some media players may have a 'party mode' whereby tracks are randomly played from your media library (and also support creating playlists from songs already in a playlist).

An app for creating a Saved Playlist (Music Media Helper - Something I wrote - free to download here on QQ):
Playlist.PNG
PlaylistCreation.png



5. View Music Metadata: Some media players support automatic 'scraping' of artist and album meta data. Information about artist biography, discography, albums, members, song lyrics, similar artists etc can be found on the Internet and saved in your music library for display during playback, if you have a TV, screen or projector connected.

A common feature is auto display of artist photos as 'fanart', or an automated slideshow of artist photos displayed while a song is playing. (Photos are auto downloaded over an internet connection or you can use your own photos).

One picture from an automated Artist Slideshow in Kodi (with user scan of the disc and album cover):
screenshot006.png



6. Headless Playback: Not all users have or want a screen or TV in their audio listening room. In this scenario some players support remote control apps so that browsing a media library and selection of albums and tracks to play is handed off to a smart phone (iPhone or Android) or tablet (iPad or Android). A wireless network is required.

This feature supports: Near instant startup (switch on), Open the remote app, select an album, track or play list. Start listening. (Even if the Media Player is in another room and without TV or PC screen being used)


7. Fast User Interface that looks great: A good media player will be fast and responsive and allow easy navigation around your music library. Some older media players and equipment with media player support are slow a quite painful to use compared to purpose designed media players with a fast processor and software. Some will show just lists of folders/files requiring a click-through (slow) methodology. A good media player will support graphics (artist and album covers) and support a mouse and/or quick navigation features and be family/wife friendly making it easier for everyone to enjoy our music!

Kodi18022.png


Kodi18023.png



8. Multi-Tasking: Some media players will also support handling multiple tasks (a must have in my opinion). For example, allowing the device to play an audio track or music video while at the same time a user can browse their library for something else to play with an attached remote app or with its HDMI connected screen. (My first media player would not allow me to browse music while it played a music video, hence moving on to another media player)

Media Player (with Kodi) is playing a track or video while I'm adding songs to the play queue on my iPad:
KMR1.png


9. A Media Player Plays Video Files too:
If you are into Music Videos/Music Concerts then this is a reminder that Media Players can also play multichannel Music Concerts (once converted into a media file)

Its possible to quite easily split music video discs by Chapters. So what? I use this to break up my Music Video Concerts to individual songs files, copy them to my server and I can now play individual Video Concert Songs from any concert on my Media player from my IPad. I can also add these to any Kodi playlist and play all my favourite videos (hands free)


10. (In the tradition of The Late Show - one more needed! - Post away!

Do we need more? Have I convinced anyone to give this a go yet? :)


Why you would not want a Media Player (The cons)


1. Work Required: Sometimes it is difficult and often its time consuming to convert discs to media files. There are a number of different disc formats and software applications (free & paid) to help users convert music and video discs to a file format that can be used by a typical media player. There's a learning curve (not difficult) and of course access to a PC or Apple Mac is required. You do not need any special hardware or 'high spec' gear, conversion can work on any PC/MAC (assuming you have a DVD or BD drive for those disc formats).

Each conversion program has its idiosyncrasies and each takes some time to convert a disc (between 5 to 20 minutes or more). With SACD users require a specific, rare (old) Sony PS3 with very old firmware, although I've heard of users that record their 5.1 analog outs to create audio versions of SACDs (that is done in real time - 40 mins to do a 40 min disc!!)

Update: There's now a new method for SACD that supports certain Oppo, Pioneer and other BD/SACD combo players. These players are still available retail.

Furthermore, to get meta data for artists and albums most media players require specific folder and file naming and structures and music files often need to be 'tagged' with some seed metadata (typically each file needs to identified with an Artist & Album Name plus a track/song Title and number (e.g 'song Title' and '01' etc) - the good news is that there are good free software tools to automate much of this and most conversion software will allow automated or semi-automated tagging while converting - more about this in a later post on this subject.


2. Audio Voodoo: There are audiophiles out there that believe that a $100 box cannot reproduce the audio quality of a $2000 player or that copying a digital source alters the original sound. If you are one of them then a Media Player is not for you! (Audio Voodoo discussions are much like religion and politics - not to be discussed here!)


3. (more needed) - Post away!


This blog/post continues from my opening post in this sub-forum found here
 
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Each conversion program has its idiosyncrasies and each takes some time to convert a disc (between 5 to 20 minutes or more). With SACD users require a specific, rare (old) Sony PS3 with very old firmware, although I've heard of users that record their 5.1 analog outs to create audio versions of SACDs (that is done in real time - 40 mins to do a 40 min disc!!)

Unfortunately this is a HUGE con (as Donald would say) because finding an older ps3 with the correct firmware is getting very difficult because these same ps3's suffered from a hardware problem that causes a part of the circuit board to burn out over time and most are old enough right now that they are all virtually burning out, the only solution is a soldering iron and a steady hand which counts out most people.

So how do you listen to your SACD'S thru your media player?

Also, for Blu-ray's the software that decodes the blu-ray's can utilize certain graphics properties of graphics cards to provide better playback and unless you have an intel nuc with an i7 you'd be able to get better playback from a PC that has 32 GB's memory and a nice video card.

Not saying that the nuc will be bad by any stretch but I've never heard of a nuc with an i7, 32 GB memory and a geforce graphics card, not for a reasonable price anyway.

You've also only really mentioned the cost of the nuc, not the cost of the software to convert your DVD-A's to iso for instance.

Media players are great but all they really are are small PC's so if you already have a PC the only benefit to a media player is size and convenience since you can just run kodi on your PC if you want to and use your PC's hdmi out just like a nuc hdmi out.

or you can just run foobar and powerdvd like I do and get better results :)

EDIT: just saw your post here: https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...k-(features-and-hardware)&p=303764#post303764

which covers much of the same ground.
 
Hi salsdali.

no doubt those old PS3s with early firmware are are rare as hen's teeth. I was lucky to find one about 3 years ago being sold by a guy that repaired gaming gear, X boxes etc (a small shop I think). That was sold on eBay and after contacting him he guaranteed it was the old firmware (older than required - you can update but not downgrade the firmware).

So I loaded the required firmware and small program and off It went. It works! It creates a disc image ISO that I convert to MCH FLAC at 24/88.2kHz on my PC with free Foobar software.

Of course these PS3s still can fail but it's also possible for them to be fixed, swap good parts between boxes etc. Maybe they can downgrade firmware by now too? I've not checked for a long time. I suspect the occasional SACD conversion is also a lot less stressful on components than full on 3D gaming too, so they'll probably last longer!

Regarding your comment on Bluray playback, all the recent Intel processors have code on chip to process 1080p video and I've not heard that an i7 can do this any better than an i3. In fact I've seen info on the Kodi forum that showed a NUC was outputting perfect 1080p pixels and colours.

Personally I cannot see any fault displaying 1080p on my 65" LG TV from my Haswell i3 (3rd gen I think) and I reckon I'm pretty fussy about such things. There's no doubt you need powerful graphics processing for real-time 3D graphics rendering but 1080p 24Hz video is pretty straight forward in comparison. Even the small low cost SOC chips coming out of China (AMLogic) can do perfect HD video (like used in many low cost media players, including the WETEK Hub I mentioned).

The challenge is to give it a go. At least with a NUC you can use it as a pretty powerful PC if you don't want to us it as a media player :) just install Windows 10 or turn into a desktop PC or SQL server, whatever!

As I said in the other thread, a media player like the ones here, bridge the gap between a conventional PC tucked away on a desk in your office and a useful small media appliance sitting almost invisibly amoungst your audio gear. Many don't want a big PC in their listening room. Those that are happy with a PC are welcome to continue of course.
 
I was wondering, as you need an old PS3 to rip SACDs, why not use the same PS3 as a media player ?
 
But could you install on the PS3 a software media player, like Kodi, that will play audio files? Audio files ripped from SACDs on the PS3 and other audio files ripped on my computer and transferred to the PS3. If I manage to find a suitable PS3 to rip my SACDs, why add yet another box to play my media files? The PS3 is very powerful (it play blu-Rays natively) and perfectly capable with the right software to play any media file, I think.
 
I was wondering, as you need an old PS3 to rip SACDs, why not use the same PS3 as a media player ?

According to the Kodi wiki, it can't be installed on the PS3 due to lack of access to the video acceleration portion of the platform and lack of developer interest.

I expect that we'll see Kodi on the XBOX One in the future due to the transition to Windows 10 and Universal Apps, but nothing's been announced by either side. That would still leave out native SACD and DVD-A playback, though.

My hope, and what I believe would drive this across the finish line for many here on the forum, is that Oppo adopts Android TV for it's application backbone when their 4k player comes out later in the year. Kodi on Android TV is excellent, and it would solve these problems for a lot of people. A near-term option is to use an Android TV box connected to the Oppo's HDMI input. I don't have an Oppo, so I haven't tried this myself, but it should work well.

media players play everything, once ripped (<-- that's the key)

That's the key, indeed. Disc playback is surprisingly versatile in Kodi, but my goal with this project/hobby which I've been working on for nine years(!) has always been to eliminate the need to touch my discs as much as possible.
 
I've never heard of a nuc with an i7, 32 GB memory and a geforce graphics card, not for a reasonable price anyway.

The new Skull Canyon NUC hits the i7 mark for $650, barebones with Iris Pro graphics, supports 32GB memory and full blown graphics card via external docking station through Thunderbolt 3. You're right about reasonable price, though: totally built out it would cost nearly $1000 without the $500 graphics dock and a video card to put in it!

As Garry mentioned, that sort of power is total overkill for most media playback scenarios including 4k, which I've played successfully on a $100 Kangaroo PC. The lower tier NUCs with later generation processors are getting perfect video scores with minimal processor draw since they have DSPs dedicated to decoding h264 and h265 video.

Audio, even high res multichannel, has barely made a blip on the processor on any of my setups over the years. I suspect that DSD playback will be more processor intensive, but I still need to try it out.
 
1. Work Required: Sometimes it is difficult and often its time consuming to convert discs to media files. There are a number of different disc formats and software applications (free & paid) to help users convert music and video discs to a file format that can be used by a typical media player. There's a learning curve (not difficult) and of course access to a PC or Apple Mac is required. You do not need any special hardware or 'high spec' gear, conversion can work on any PC/MAC (assuming you have a DVD or BD drive for those disc formats).

Each conversion program has its idiosyncrasies and each takes some time to convert a disc (between 5 to 20 minutes or more). With SACD users require a specific, rare (old) Sony PS3 with very old firmware, although I've heard of users that record their 5.1 analog outs to create audio versions of SACDs (that is done in real time - 40 mins to do a 40 min disc!!)

Furthermore, to get meta data for artists and albums most media players require specific folder and file naming and structures and music files often need to be 'tagged' with some seed metadata (typically each file needs to identified with an Artist & Album Name plus a track/song Title and number (e.g 'song Title' and '01' etc) - the good news is that there are good free software tools to automate much of this and most conversion software will allow automated or semi-automated tagging while converting - more about this in a later post on this subject.

Great post HomerJAU! Looks fantastic...
So none of my discs have been converted to media files. The biggest reasons being the time involved and most of the discussions I read give the impression that people are having to jump through multiple software hoops to get their discs converted. Not including the SACD/PS3 thing. (It's 2016, I figured if I waited long enough this stuff would be much further along in the development curve by now :confused:) But now I'm thinking maybe I should dive in and start with my CD's. At least that would get the ball rolling before tackling DVD's and BD's. Any "For Dummies" info on getting newbs discs converted to media files would be most appreciated:)
 
Great post HomerJAU! Looks fantastic...
So none of my discs have been converted to media files. The biggest reasons being the time involved and most of the discussions I read give the impression that people are having to jump through multiple software hoops to get their discs converted. Not including the SACD/PS3 thing. (It's 2016, I figured if I waited long enough this stuff would be much further along in the development curve by now :confused:) But now I'm thinking maybe I should dive in and start with my CD's. At least that would get the ball rolling before tackling DVD's and BD's. Any "For Dummies" info on getting newbs discs converted to media files would be most appreciated:)

I'm probably going to post my initial thread on Conversion tomorrow, but I'm mindful that its seen as illegal in many places (Not sure why ripping CDs is openly legal (Apple ITunes etc) yet DVD and BD etc is taboo... But that's not a subject for discussion on this thread. I'm only advocating backup & playback of the discs users own.
 
The new Skull Canyon NUC hits the i7 mark for $650, barebones with Iris Pro graphics, supports 32GB memory and full blown graphics card via external docking station through Thunderbolt 3. You're right about reasonable price, though: totally built out it would cost nearly $1000 without the $500 graphics dock and a video card to put in it!

As Garry mentioned, that sort of power is total overkill for most media playback scenarios including 4k, which I've played successfully on a $100 Kangaroo PC. The lower tier NUCs with later generation processors are getting perfect video scores with minimal processor draw since they have DSPs dedicated to decoding h264 and h265 video.

Audio, even high res multichannel, has barely made a blip on the processor on any of my setups over the years. I suspect that DSD playback will be more processor intensive, but I still need to try it out.

I'm too drunk to find the link now but blu-ray processing is so much more involved than simply outputting 1080P.

There are at least 10 criteria a certain website uses to test each blu-ray player (or software) and each criteria is dependent on hardware, not software (Cadence 3:2, etc, crap I don't even know what they are talking about but they have screenshots that show the difference and there is a difference.).

1080P is just the tip of the iceberg on how a blu-ray will be displayed on your monitor.

I'll report back later but it's one of the reasons the OPPO is such highly rated and I doubt an i3 running kodi is able to duplicate an OPPO.

Kodi software is very powerful but it needs to draw off the hardware. There is no faking hardware and i3's with IG just aren't that spectacular. Sure they'll output 1080P but that's just the beginning of what makes a good blu-ray playback.

like said, for music I'm sure kodi is just fine but blu-ray video is a different ballgame.
 
Does an Intel NUC comes with its own player software, and if so what media file formats can it play? Does it allow bitperfect streaming of data to an AVR, e.g. for outboard decoding of .dts files?

Can it be loaded with 3rd party player software e.g. foobar2k, (which I already use to play every lossless and lossy audio file type from a laptop/HD combo)?
 
Does an Intel NUC comes with its own player software, and if so what media file formats can it play? Does it allow bitperfect streaming of data to an AVR, e.g. for outboard decoding of .dts files?

Can it be loaded with 3rd party player software e.g. foobar2k, (which I already use to play every lossless and lossy audio file type from a laptop/HD combo)?


You're understanding it backward. Kodi is the software, the intel nuc is the hardware.

Think of the Nuc like your PC only smaller

Think of the Kodi software like foobar combined with PowerDvd, VLC, etc

Intel nuc comes with no software. You would install Kodi on the nuc and then nuc will then play everything that's loaded to it. The problem is you have to convert everything you own to be able to load it onto the Nuc with Kodi.

Intel nuc are just really small PC's that can be hidden amongst your AV equipment, unlike a PC which is rather large.

Other than that Kodi is very similar to foobar, just more universal.

Also, kodi comes with all the plug-ins pre-installed (it's built into the software) whereas for foobar you have to add in plugins for the various formats so kodi is more convenient in that sense.
 
Does an Intel NUC comes with its own player software, and if so what media file formats can it play? Does it allow bitperfect streaming of data to an AVR, e.g. for outboard decoding of .dts files?

Can it be loaded with 3rd party player software e.g. foobar2k, (which I already use to play every lossless and lossy audio file type from a laptop/HD combo)?

An Intel NUC is a barebones micro PC. No software is included. It includes a standard x64 Intel processor so you could install Windows 64bit and use a Bluetooth keyboard etc and run Foobar etc.

Kodi is the 3rd Party software I'm proposing to use here with a Linux OS. Since its all free and super fast. This combo supports almost all media formats (not DSD), MCH audio up to 7.1 and HD video, lossless high res FLAC and DTS-HDMA, Dolby TrueHD, Atmos bla blah, some by HDMI Pass-through to an AVR via bit perfect bitstream (e.g. The AVR could do Atmos and DTS:X at > 7.1 or all your DTS decoding at any AVR supported sample/bitrates - DTS-cd, DVDA and BDA at 24/192 etc. I can do all that now on my i3 NUC with Kodi and my Denon AVR.
 
I'm too drunk to find the link now but blu-ray processing is so much more involved than simply outputting 1080P.

There are at least 10 criteria a certain website uses to test each blu-ray player (or software) and each criteria is dependent on hardware, not software (Cadence 3:2, etc, crap I don't even know what they are talking about but they have screenshots that show the difference and there is a difference.).

1080P is just the tip of the iceberg on how a blu-ray will be displayed on your monitor.

I'll report back later but it's one of the reasons the OPPO is such highly rated and I doubt an i3 running kodi is able to duplicate an OPPO.

Kodi software is very powerful but it needs to draw off the hardware. There is no faking hardware and i3's with IG just aren't that spectacular. Sure they'll output 1080P but that's just the beginning of what makes a good blu-ray playback.

like said, for music I'm sure kodi is just fine but blu-ray video is a different ballgame.

Valid points. The question in the HTPC/media streamer community has always been "does it play 1080p?" when maybe the question should be "does it play 1080p well?" Discussions are most often geared toward convenience and "good enough" rather than creating the absolute best experience. The most in-depth that I've seen any HTPC review go in regard to video playback is refresh rate ability and accuracy, the ability to play back certain resolutions and file types, and deinterlacing performance. Color accuracy, black levels, moire, etc etc etc are always left off the table. I expect that you're right that hardware would trump software but that software would make a strong showing.

A parallel example with Kodi is actually in the realm of music playback: the murkiness of the current status and capabilities of DSD playback have been brought up, but it's also worth noting that there are quirks and inconsistencies involved with getting true bit-perfect PCM playback as well, at least under Windows and MacOS, due to the OSs inserting themselves into the signal chain. I'm not sure about Linux, Android, TVOS, and FireOS, the last three of which are primarily on their own Kodi forks which will make it even hardware to nail down an answer, but it's a challenge for all computer based playback options, not just Kodi.

With that said, my experiences with the software over the years have been very good and I feel that the quality level of reproduction across the board meets or beats any hardware player that I've owned for both audio and video, regardless of the hardware platform that I'm running Kodi on. My recommendation for everyone is to take it for a spin with some sample files from material they know and love and see if it meets their needs and if the considerable amount of work (assuming one hasn't digitized their library yet) outweighs the inconvenience of handling discs.
 
You're understanding it backward. Kodi is the software, the intel nuc is the hardware.


I'm quite clear on the difference between hardware and software, thanks. I'm also extremely experienced in 'converting' CDs and other disc audio to playable files on a hard drive, for playback with media player software, in my case, foobar2k on a Windows laptop, configured for bitperfect digital output to an AVR via HDMI.

My question (which I thought was clear) was: what software does the NUC come loaded with, if any, to play media files?

The question was then, what audio file formats can that software play, and can it be configured for bit perfect digital output, e.g., of .dts files, that will be decoded downstream in an AVR.

The auxiliary question was, can the NUC run other player software, specifically Windows-based foobar2k.

These were essentially quick and lazy questions so I wouldn't have to bother to look deeply into the Intel NUC online info.

So, the answers regarding the NUC I glean further down are:
- no preloaded player software
- installed default OS is ---what? Linux? Something else? Choose at time of purchase?
- can be loaded with WinOS and then foobar
 
what software does the NUC come loaded with, if any, to play media files?

The NUC is barebones with no OS or hard disk preinstalled. Many users choose to do a full install of Windows or Linux, and many use one of the free Linux Kodi builds like LibreELEC.

what audio file formats can that software play, and can it be configured for bit perfect digital output, e.g., of .dts files, that will be decoded downstream in an AVR.

The answers here are a little sticky. The format support list from their wiki is:

Audio formats: MIDI, AIFF, WAV/WAVE, AIFF, MP2, MP3, AAC, AACplus (AAC+), Vorbis, AC3, DTS, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Monkey's Audio (APE), RealAudio, SHN, WavPack, MPC/Musepack/Mpeg+, Shorten, Speex, WMA, IT, S3M, MOD (Amiga Module), XM, NSF (NES Sound Format), SPC (SNES), GYM (Genesis), SID (Commodore 64), Adlib, YM (Atari ST), ADPCM (Nintendo GameCube), and CDDA.

I believe that bit-perfect playback is possible, but there are variations from hardware platform to platform the affect one's ability to get true bit-perfect playback, and different mechanisms that need to be employed to get to it on platforms where it's possible. Sadly, I'm not intimately familiar with them at this time.

To that end, bitstream decoding from .dts files works in some situations but not all.

The auxiliary question was, can the NUC run other player software, specifically Windows-based foobar2k.

The NUC can accept a Windows install and by extension any Windows software that one needs.
 
The auxiliary question was, can the NUC run other player software, specifically Windows-based foobar2k.

You can definitley put Windows and any win programs on a NUC. You will be able to run Foobar with its plugins so you can have a Foobar Media Player in your equipment rack. You can play the same media as you do on any Windows/Intel based PC. The Intel chip can deal with 7.1 audio and Foobar plugins can decode many codec and there's probably options to send bitstream via HDMI too if you can do that now on your current Win PC.

If Foobar supports Remote Control or if there's a Foorbar remote control app then you could have a nice solution.

One downside is the cost of a Windows license. That adds a fair whack, more than the cost of the WETEK Hub or Rasberry Pi3 option (but you do have Windows which may make some feel more comfortable)

I'd encourage someone here to give this a go and post a new thread on QQ: Foobar on a NUC
 
There's a certain cluelessness among the geeks, er, I mean, tech savvy, respondents.

If the *operating system* needs to be installed, that should be made prominent up front. Jesus, really, c'mon.

and then the *media player software* and plugins/settings required to make stuff work
 
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