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I'm after one of those hard drives you can connect up to your telly. Can anyone recommend one? I guess these days they are all HDMI and can handle the majority of video types?
A hard drive will normally be a USB drive that you plug into the TV.
The thing you are referring to I think is a media player. This is a device that you plug into your TV to play things off the hard drive or other storage device.
If it's the latter, look at a Raspberry Pi.
HDMI is for transferring audio and video streams, not data.
If your TV has WiFi you can use a NAS drive.
If not I guess plug one into a console via USB and then the console via HDMI to the TV.
They aren't all created equal regarding picture quality and playback of all normal files.
If you have storage elsewhere: WDTV Live
If you need to store on the device: WDTV Live Hub
There are plenty of others, but if you want the no-brainer ones, these are good.
the mede8er 600x3d or 800x3d are good media players, depends what you want. my router, amp and dvd drive you can plug hdd into but they are not media players or nas, they just hold data that the tv/bluray/media player use to play, some are much better than others.
android boxes are supposed to not quite be at a decent usable level yet
Sorry, I wasn't very clear as I was rushing the post before I quit work for the weekend. My brother in law has something similar to this (not the same one):
Just wondered if anyone had experience of any others.
Yep the mede8ers and WDTVs will do that - choose ones which you can add your own HDD to if you like.
(there are tons).
I personally prefer the Sigma-based ones (as opposed to Realtek)
I've used my Pi with a portable drive mounted into it before now and that worked okay but there will be a lot about.
Have a look around on Amazon and read up on some reviews. No doubt you'll end up spending more than you planned to though and have features you never knew existed!
First things first define what you want to do rather than what you want to buy. There's some great tech out there but eventually people will start talking DLNA, renderers, streaming, codecs etc and it can get confusing. Tell us what you want to achieve and I'm sure we can help.