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For the last 14 years or so I have worked from my home office. All of that time I have had KODI (XBMC as it was known in the original XBOX days). Anyhow I have taken a new job that requires a lot of travel. I'm terrified at the thought of having to watch hotel cable TV.
Can someone recommend a good Kodi box for traveling? I don't use streaming addons and don't plan on starting to either since hotel internet doesn't sound like a decent experience. Should I get an Android box and plug a USB hard drive into to (with my videos on it) or should I get a jumbo SD Card?
I just don't know... at the house here I have Windows PCs connected to all the TVs and I obviously can't travel with a Desktop in tow...
What are fellow travelers on here using?
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Depends on the resolution of the media you want.
Personally I have a 4TB WD MyPassport drive of DVD rips connected up to a Pi zero with an IR diode on the GPIO pins for a remote receiver and it works beautifully.
Wouldn't work so well with Blu-ray/4K stuff but for my needs it does fine.
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2017-06-29, 21:50
(This post was last modified: 2017-06-30, 10:54 by Prof Yaffle.)
For flash memory, at that size, you're going to spend more on the card than the box. Stick with spinning rust IMO - 500GB of SD is $225 or so, I'd guess, but a real disk (if you can still get one that small!) will be a third of that. Indeed, you might even have a suitable 2.5" drive in a drawer or an old system - upgrade that to SSD, recycle the disk with a $10 USB enclosure.
I don't know how well Android plays with USB drives. Building a Pi, though, is just a matter of putting it in a box and installing LibreElec onto a flash card.
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Thanks everyone for the tips! The more I think about it the more I think a 128GB sdcard might be fine for my use. I've got 2 weeks until I begin the new job so hopefully I can get a raspberry Pi setup by then.
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I've you've the time/appetite to re-encode stuff, you could squash films down to 720p with RF22+ and even a BR source would be no more than a couple of GB per film - while still being perfectly watchable.
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BFeely
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If your Internet connection at home is fast enough, perhaps look into operating a VPN server as well as a NAS from your home so you don't have to pick and choose what media to cram on to your device, just log in and stream as if you were home on the LAN.
Pretty sure most VPN clients on devices should support the classic private/corporate style VPNs topology instead of just those pay services often used with banned addons.
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From experience of a lot of hotel WiFi speeds that idea won't be usable due to the hotel network speeds locally regardless of the home network speed.
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mchp92
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The biggest (most frequent) problem i found in hotels is not wifi speed, but (in)ability to access another tv signal source on the hotel telly...
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nickr
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If you are traveling for work, do you have a laptop with HDMI out?
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