Raspberry Pi to view media on TV

[DSP_Kevlar]

Hey,

I am trying to setup my TV so that I can view all of my movies on it without having an HDMI cable go from my laptop to my TV. The current options that I have in mind are:
-Google Chromecast
-GoFlex TV
-Raspberry Pi

The reason I don't want to use the Chormecast is because I want my external to alway be connected and not HAVE to stream through my laptop.

GoFlex is too expensive and I beleive it has internal memory, but I alreay have a few harddrives that I can view media from.

I was thinking I could setup a Raspberry Pi to connect to multiple hard drives, and if I install a plex server I should be able to stream content to it as well.

If this is not what you think the best solution is, I am open to suggestions, my overall objective is to be able to view my local media without using my standard laptop, and be able to stream content from my laptop (netflix, youtube) if I want to.

Thanks in advance!

 

[strollin]

I have both a RP and a Chromecast and between the two, the hands down winner is the Chromecast for me. However, as you stated, with the Chromecast (at least for the time being) you would need to use your laptop to play movies from an external drive.

I found the RP to be unbearably slow. It's a neat little device that is great for what it was originally designed for (a teaching aid for students) but, IMO, lacks the horsepower to be anything useful like a media server. However, I have an early model with only 256M of RAM, the newer ones come with 512M RAM so they should perform better.

The Chromecast has a bunch of developers that have developed apps that will give it lots more functionality but Google isn't allowing those apps to be released yet since they are still stabilizing the API. In a few months, the Chromecast should have apps available that will let you do what you want. I think the future is bright for the Chromecast.