Howdy all.
Got a question for the hive mind. I'm again planning and replanning the AV stuff in my living room. I want to be able to stream audio (FLAC files) and ripped DVDs and Blu-rays from a NAS (most likely going to be a Synology) through to my TV and amp.
The amp I'm wanting is the Yamaha RXV675 as it can do the audio streaming, but I can't find anywhere in the specs that it does video.
I want to be able to play the 5.1 from the video files and DVDAs I've got ripped, so do I need something in between the amp and the NAS if they're all DLNA?
The TV and RXV675 both support ARC - I have no idea how good that technology is, but presumably it'll negate the need for an intermediary box. Does using it produce any discernable delay?
Also, I'd like to use the sub for the low end when playing stereo files.
From looking at the manual I should be able to run speaker cable from the main speaker outputs to the sub. However, how would that then affect listening to 5.1 audio? The sub'd be getting a signal from the sub woofer out on the amp as well as the speaker outputs. Would that bugger things up sound wise? Hmm, could I just run the sub from the main speakers? <more research needed>
I *will* reply more, possibly either when I'm on the train (unless I'm "sardining", damn London trains) or later, when I'm at home. Or maybe tomorrow.
The quick answer is maybe, but you might be better off with a streaming media player of sorts, like a WDTV or Mede8er or something like that.
- ARC basically uses the HDMI cable between the AVR and TV to not only do the usual thing of audio & video from the receiver to the TV, but allows audio back from the TV to the receiver as well (you seem to know this already anyway)
- DLNA != streaming media off a share
- DLNA sometimes re-encodes material before sending it to the playing device, depending (almost entirely, I believe) on what capabilities the player advertises and what the source device is configured to do; so sometimes the source may decide that it's better to convert to MP3 or WAV or PCM or RAW or something, which is annoyingly hard to control. If it needs to re-encode video, you can imagine that it will definitely struggle with higher bitrates, depending on the actual crunching power of the source device.
In my opinion, UPnP / DLNA are a pain to work with if you want to actually control them, so what I have is a Windows server with a network share, which is accessed by a Mede8er MED600X3D; that means there's no transcoding or configuration jiggery-pokery, and the player just streams the original file. My only problem right now is that the Mede8er is a little buggy and that the Windows share struggles to keep up with 30GB+ BluRay rips, so I might move the whole thing to Linux and NFS, that combo has always tended to benchmark better in terms of throughput capabilities. And no, it's not the network - it's all wired at 1Gbps...