After some app recommendations

[M_Taylor40]

Hey everyone, I've had my Surface 2 for about a week now and I'm after some app recommendations.

First one is a decent Twitter client, preferably one that will sync its timeline with a Windows Phone 8/8.1 app as well so no matter what I access Twitter on I don't have to scroll through my timeline to the new tweets. I'm currently using Mehdoh on my Dell Venue Pro (WP7.8) but will be upgrading to a Nokia Lumia 930 as soon as I can get my hands on one!

The second app I'm after is a decent media player that can play H.264 MP4s, DivX/Xvii AVIs and maybe the odd MKV that will be streamed from a Netgear ReadyNAS NVX. DLNA isn't correctly turned on as I just access through SMB/Mapped drive on my HTPCs using XBMC. I've looked at Plex but as I can't get a trial I'm not sure if it would be suitable, there's a server add-on for the ReadyNAS but I'm not sure how it'll handle the on-the-fly file transcoding, if it even needs to do it for those formats. I've used PressPlay and the standard W8 Videos apps which play the files if I navigate to them but I'd love something that can organise the files like XBMC does.

Finally, if you have any app recommendations please just make them. There's loads of apps on the store but there's so many clones that its difficult to know what's great and what's not so I think everyone would agree that some real user reviews/suggestions would be great!

Thanks for reading and providing suggestions!

M_Taylor40

 

[mcewinter]

Plex is fantastic. It plays a variety of file types and can force play types you may not even have codecs for. It will even grab metadata making for a very intuitive interface. I like Plex more and more the more I use it.

Regarding other apps, I find Splashtop a must have to access PCs on my network. Otherwise, My Media Center and MyMovies are a must have in my home as we use Windows Media Center for TV/DVR and movies.

 

[M_Taylor40]

Thanks for the response mcewinter.

I've been looking into Plex a bit more and while there is a plugin for my ReadyNAS NVX, the NAS itself is not powerful enough to transcode the files on the fly.

I could easily configure a Plex Server running on one of my Hyper-V servers but I'm thinking of re-encoding my content from the AVI/DivX and MKV formats into H.264 MP4s. Sure it'll take a bit of time but as a quick test my main PC can encode approximately 60 minutes of footage in 5 minutes, which as I'm redoing them direct from my DVDs there's no loss in quality but each file is smaller in size.

I used to use Windows Media Centre myself until Windows 8 came out. I got one of the free upgrade keys from MS to make my W8 Pro into Pro with MCE, but wasn't impressed by the fact its the same MCE build that was in Windows 7. Because of that I started looking into XBMC and I can honestly say I've never looked back.

How similar is the Plex app for Windows RT compared to the Windows 8 one? If they are the same I'll setup a test Plex Server with a few files and install Plex on my desktop to see what I think, I just don't want to waste my money buying it for my Surface 2 if I don't like the app.

 

[mcewinter]

I have no experience with Windows 8 aside from RT so I can't offer any comparison. You can try mediabrowser as it is very similar which does offer a one day trial. My experience was only that one day as it was so similar I didn't see an immediate need for it. It is held in high regards by many so I felt it was worth the mention.

 

[alienking70]

As for the Twitter client, I've been using Gleek. It's been fantastic so far and stays in sync with my Lumia 928. Whichever one I'm on it takes me right to where I left off. It does streaming of your feed as well which I like.