So with the completion of my media streaming project, the gadget monster has retired to its cave and is snoring loudly. It seems to have missed the furor around the PS3 and is quite happy that we can now watch our home movies, movie trailers, photos and all of the DVDs I’ve encoded, from the comfort of our sofas.
As regular reader(s) know, I abandoned the Apple TV idea because I couldn’t be bothered to code everything, wasn’t sure that iTunes was man enough for 100gb of video and didn’t see the point as iTunes UK only sells music videos which don’t make for an entertaining evening in front of the TV.
The project didn’t run quite to plan… to support the Netgear EVA700 player I sourced a Netgear SC101 network storage box as, according to the Netgear website, the two would work together to stream media files to the TV. This turned out to be a lie because the SC101 doesn’t have a media server built in. So after transferring all of my media to it, it turned out that I still needed the desktop to run because something needed to serve the media out. In this case performance was worse than just having it on the PC because now files were travelling in 2 directions along the pipe (100baseT network) before being transferred to the wireless network for streaming.
So after much research I sourced a Buffalo Linkstation Home Server. I had a bad experience with a Buffalo device so don’t usually go near them but this piece of kit is a dream. It’s a tiny, quiet, low power, 400GB linux box which acts as networkable storage, and has media server, itunes server, webserver, printer server and ftp server services running out of the box. Oh and it’s gigabit too for when I upgrade the network. Being linux means that if I knew how I could run all sorts of web tools and apps on it, and even upgrade the media server software should I need to. The out of the box services are a little limited, but it suits me fine.
So now we can access our media without the noisy PC on and the media is available in a flash. If I want to access from other rooms all i need is additional media streamers. I now have the slow task of encoding DVDs on to the network but hey those of you that know me know I need at least one little technical project to keep me sane now I don’t do much engineering any more…
