Media Streaming (nlc)

[Sanjøy]

lol, the non-local grandparents are a bit of a tech wasteland. It would be nice, but I don't think I could handle the support involved each time it was switched on!

Free logmein account. My mum has been away visiting my sister of late and came home without a scoob of any of her pwds and chrome seemed to have decided to forget them. Simply switched on the machine and I jumped on and reset the lot remotely and they emailed me as the backup account for gmail, fbook, skype & MSN.

[Lazydonkey]

ive been running xbmc live for a few months now and im really impressed with it- will try boxee too now though

[Mikie711]

I have just got the new apple TV. A more discrete streamer you'll struggle to find, it's tiny!!. I know everybody goes on about itunes and supported formats but with a copy of Handbrake (free) you can convert anything so that it'll play through itunes and hence apple TV. And it's only £99.

[Shug]

Which is more than or the same as dozens of streamers similarly easy to set up, but without the hassle of converting anything

Those costing more, tend to offer much more in the way of functionality (such as the ability to locally mount a hard drive and use it as a BitTorrent/FTP client, being a major one)

Apple tax. But if it makes you happy, then it's the right product - each to their own

[Mikie711]

I just liked the fact that all I had to do was plug it in, it did the rest. No faffing about and it's a simple neat solution. At the end of the day what do you want to do, stream movies from central storage, then get a media streamer. Storing gigabytes of movies, music etc close to a tv, that I don't see the point of. It's basically another computer, why not use the one you have. Why buy another "media center". New HDD or external storage is alot cheaper. That and you probably have something that will already do the same thing. PS3 or xbox to name a couple.
That probably simplifies it to far, but for me I wanted all my media in one place with the ability to replay DVD's, movies (bought), movies (made), movies copied I mean borrowed, music, pictures etc on my TV in any room. I found my solution hope you find yours.
Guys on the rig come out with all manner of media streamers, all claiming to do this and that but one common thread with all of them is that at some point you have to connect it to a computer. That's fine for a portable system to watch sh!t on your travels, but at home!! what the f$%k is the point.
One of my biggest beafs with all this tech is cables and power supplies. Nearly need a degree in electrical engineering to look behind my TV. But I digress..................

[Sanjøy]

Popcorn, boxee and many more all have TB hard drives and are stand alone. Personally the apple tv is a non starter for me as it requires a machine running itunes to access your local content. Even a usb / firewire socket for storage would have helped.

[campbell]

I'm only just getting into this "streaming" lark.

However, I think a good way to go is to use what free tools you can find initially, until you get a feel for what you truly need (which may not be very much...in our case for example, it's mostly digital picture shows, the odd family holiday video, and our reasonably extensive MP3 collection).

WMP has been OK-ish for this, although everything is sorted badly cos I don't use it for management of original material on the PC so albums of music and photos are in random orders etc (!).

This is why I'm interested in Mezzmo, which has a free trial and is $25 to buy...if it can provide decent library management via sync with iTunes etc (which it claims), and offers a more navigable solution at our DLNA telly end, then I'm happy.

I nearly nearly bought a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo enclosure, which would:

- take care of resilience / backups
- stream for Squeezebox, iTunes etc
- be DLNA compliant
- offer mega disk space without replacing disks in our home PC
- enable the whole family to do stuff even when the PC is off
- network enable our printer so that our laptops can print when the home PC is off
- etc.

...but I had to throw the money at UJI for Spa instead

This device is still on my radar.

[Shug]

Campbell - I'm confused mate - which part of this allows you to display on the TV?

Do you have a network enabled TV or Bluray?

[campbell]

Shug? Confused about AV? No, surely not!

Absolutely spot on, we have a Sony Bravia LCD telly with magic RJ45 port, and recently added a Sony blu-ray player with same.

With the usual no-nonsense guidance from our tame networking guru Robin, I bought a couple of homeplugs and a baby repeater to wire the stuff into our existing net. Have been enjoying MP3s via the telly (which has an output to the hifi system hence no need to suffer tinny sounds!) and of course boring all with my Spa pics over and over on the big screen

Have also played back some home movies which I hadn't got round to authoring to DVD and in many ways that could become the killer app...avoiding that last stage, and "just watching the thing" once the edit is complete, is very satisfying.

Campbell
(simples faction)

[Shug]

Gotcha - cool stuff

[campbell]

What is even cooler was watching some HD material via the iPlayer service on the Blu Ray player (one of the primary reasons for buying it actually!!).

My brother just bought the latest generation Sony Bravia TV which itself has the iPlayer service built in now...that really is cool.

Both have YouTube as well, which was entertaining because I was able to show the kids Kenny's lap of Spa in the p!ssing rain, on the big screen...the search functionality is quite clever too (works with mobile phone style numeric keypad presses for letters etc...the iPlayer one is a little more primitive but still adequate).

There is also Demand5 for Channel 5 stuff (!). No 4-OD though, which would have been nice. Might be added one day I suppose.

Which reminds me...I need to get Lisa to phone Virgin Media to ask what they'll knock off our bill if we no longer require the telly service All we need is an aerial rigger to refresh our antenna setup and its Freeview all the way baby.

[Sanjøy]

I have been tweeting and chatting to a few peeps about that very conundrum Campbell. With Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee et al being laucnhed this year Sky bband, Virgin Media, Comcast, Verizon and the rest risk simply becoming ISPs providing the medium for which you choose how you consume content. Any of the hardware I mentioned are capable of running a BBC app (iplayer, live iplayer), HBO app, Discovery Channel, Warner Brothers App etc. No more middle man TV company you subscribe to what you want directly. You have it on your TV, you phone, you 'puter.

There are a lot of back room deals happening right now to try to secure the fortunes of these companies as this will happen fast.

Hmmm out of the blue Google deal with Verizon on net neutralitypre launch of Google TV.

There is also the inherent problem that the internet is not ready for this, how many people have a bband link capable of pulling 100+GB a week ? Lets not forget we want it all in HD!

2p

[campbell]

LOL, interesting analysis. Knew a bit about some of it having read "Googled" recently. Didn't realise how quickly we'd be getting on the bandwagon!

[BiggestNizzy]

I use a multitude of options as nothing yet seems to tick all my boxes.

Modded xbox running XBMC it's small compact and is fantastic at the mp3 bit it doesn't have the oomph to play HD soit's video duties have been repaced by a ps3 plays HD no problem so using an old PC with XBMC on it running as a media server I stream all video to the PS3 the XBOX360 just gathers dust as it's a bit sh*t.

[Ferg]

The new Sony media streamer is a bit cheeky. It lists NTFS in it's compatibility list. I got excited until I dug a little deeper and found that only applied to USB drives, not network shares. I know it's not ng to happen, but sometimes I wish Sony would just stump up and get NTFS license so my PS3 could be a much more usable for streaming. I know all you need is DLNA, but even then, the Sony implementation of that is pretty poor too.

all that and I'm a sony fanboi too.