I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Scott from Haven popped around today to show me their Media Center PC. It’s sexy. Pride of stereo rack type sexy. Secondary front display, brushed aluminium, cooling fins, quiet. Nice.
Pricey though, and after a good play I just didn’t want a Media PC on my TV. It’s overkill. Since we have MySky, which is an optimized PVR, I don’t really want to go back to a generic device even though it does a lot more stuff. My wife loves MySky. George has all his Blues Clues on there. (We keep the Steve and delete the Joe ones). We can’t go back and I just don’t want to have to fight with Windows from the sofa.
MySky lacks access to music and photo’s though.
So Scott came up with the idea of using a Dlink Media Lounge. This streams the common Windows file types into your TV. It’s around $500 and does *just* what I want.
I learnt from Scott that to stream media around the house you need to run some server side streaming software. Microsoft has one called Windows Media Connect, which installs a control panel item. Seems easy.
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Hi Rod! I bought the D-Link media player a few months ago but have to say I was ver dissapointed. It kind of keeps what they promise, but it’s all the small details you just don’t think about when ordering, like;
-Wireless is too slow. Even with 802.11g support most of my video files were too large to stream propperly. Every time me and my mates sat down for a downloaded (paid for, of course :)) movie, it would lag, sound go out of sync or just suddenly stop for minutes at a time. There are conversion softwares out there to reduse the framerate but can take almost as long to convert as the lengt of the video itself, depending on your CPU. It goes without saying that this is a very tidious task and leaves you with movies that look shitty when you go back to play them on your computer.
-Unsupported formats. Although the list of supported formats seems impressing at first glance but there are so many new versions of .avi (Xvid and new DivX especially) and mpeg that is not supported. Aprox. half of my extensive video collection could not be read without conversion. Again, a very time-consuming job to fix.
-Hopeless user interface. When you get a large collection of music or videos you need to be able to organize properly, not browse trough a list for hours.
-No “add to playlist” as you browse through music.
-Very limited image format support.
-Can only connect to one computer server at once.
-Server streaming software that comes with D-link is buggy and crashes very often, especially when an unsupported video is tried playing (witch happens often since you have no idea it is unsupported until you try). The other alternative, Windows Media Connect is more stabile but very limited in supported file types.
I have sold my Media Lounge and I’m now going to build my own instead!