Media Streaming??? Do You?

qwerty1982

Hey all.

I currently have a Cyclone mecia centre which stores all my films and music on it. This will play all types of MP4's, AVI's etc etc but can only play through one TV.
Moving into a new house soon and while doing it up I will place Cat5 cables into all the rooms and want to run a media server and have some form of streaming devioce... meaning I have all the films in one place but can be viewed in many places...

Any of you do this? If so what product do you use?

Cheers

Gizmokev

Old X-Box cracked and sitting on the network.....brilliant but wont handle HD movies

qwerty1982

Yeah i have done that in the past, but due to old style HDD, can only have 230Gb and need some thing that can run at least 1TB and possibly deal with RAId as want it all back up.

Gizmokev

I just used the X-Box as a streamer......all the data was on my PC in the other room....

qwerty1982

Hmm good idea.

Apart from a Pc... heard of any thing else can be used thats good to store the data?

Gizmokev

Just get an old pc and fill it full of HDD and put windows server on it or similar.....thats all you need to get it working....

nicklouse

qwerty1982
new house go Cat 6 or 5E atleast.

I have 3 NAS over the place. If you are going to hide things away then dont forget power points and ventilation.

Media streamers. there are many different types. some are better at music than movies,

Have a good think about what you want from it. and would an old laptop do better.

qwerty1982

CHEERS FOR ADVICE

SSLYBY

Dont bother with cat 6 its a waste of money, decent cat 5e cable will be good enough. if you want to future proof you want to install cat 6a

Daz555

I have a 3TB NAS which I built myself - Intel Atom based running Ubuntu server and uses very little power. This serves everything data wise in my house. I also have an old IcyBox NAS out in the garage and I run backups of irreplaceable data to this device every week.

My media centre is in a nice case but is made up of old kit from my old gaming pcs over the years and runs Media Portal on WinXP.

The only thing I "stream" however is MP3s as I have some music devices which require upnp/dlna. I much prefer to simply play media via samba share where possible.

Anonymous

I have a PC which is my main entertainment "thing", it's connected to my HifI, and has dual freeview tuners. It has my entire music collection on it, and is connected to a large monitor, which is shared with my Xbox, most of the time.
Then, I have a Samsung DLNA-equipped television, which can stream things from the PC, or occasionally, I use the xbox as a streaming receiver.

bluechair84

I have built a media PC which is connected up to the TV. All movies and music are stored in sharing folders which can be accessed through our laptops. We can then watch movies on the laptops when in bed, or hook them up to a set of wandering-speakers to play music in different rooms.
I've a large 20" laptop so we can get away without TVs in other rooms and just stream them up on that and the wandering-speakers.
I've an android phone which is DLNA enabled but I've not worked out how to use it yet - I think I can stream playlist to the phone and out of the wandering-speakers too. Not got there yet. TBH, out house is so small the lounge amp fills the place 8)

Anonymous

I'd hate wandering speakers. I hate it when my electronic gear goes wandering off by itself when I need it.

bluechair84

then turn them down!

Bike-Spy

Like other have said, don't bother with Cat 6, it can be very fragile, Cat 5e is a much better bet, more robust and good enough for what you want.

I have a wired network to part of my house and used Cat 5e with gigabit switches and it streams just fine.

I centrally store all my movies, photos and music on a ReadyNAS dual bay device. I chose this because it is very easy to setup, provides redundancy for a basic level of data loss prevention and is low powered when in standby. Mine is on 24/7, 365 days a year and has been perfect (touch wood).

With this setup, I am able to stream to multiple devices across the house, both wired and wireless.

Mojo_666

qwerty1982 wrote:

Hey all.

I currently have a Cyclone mecia centre which stores all my films and music on it. This will play all types of MP4's, AVI's etc etc but can only play through one TV.
Moving into a new house soon and while doing it up I will place Cat5 cables into all the rooms and want to run a media server and have some form of streaming devioce... meaning I have all the films in one place but can be viewed in many places...

Any of you do this? If so what product do you use?

Cheers

I use a media center running windows 7 for this

A dude i work with uses twonky and can stream to his phones aswell as everything else.

bluechair84

I have just got WMP11 to share or stream to my phone. It will share to DLNA enabled whatever and other WMP11 installs. An issue I have is that 'sharing folders' are not visable between our three versions of Windows (XP + Vista + 7), but WMP11 does it fine.

Mojo_666

bluechair84 wrote:

I have just got WMP11 to share or stream to my phone. It will share to DLNA enabled whatever and other WMP11 installs. An issue I have is that 'sharing folders' are not visable between our three versions of Windows (XP + Vista + 7), but WMP11 does it fine.

Do you need an app on your phone or? I never tried or even thought much about streaming to my phone but u I have the same wmp11 set up.

nicklouse

I stream to my phone using iPeng for Squeezebox.

bluechair84

Mojo_666 wrote:

bluechair84 wrote:

I have just got WMP11 to share or stream to my phone. It will share to DLNA enabled whatever and other WMP11 installs. An issue I have is that 'sharing folders' are not visable between our three versions of Windows (XP + Vista + 7), but WMP11 does it fine.

Do you need an app on your phone or? I never tried or even thought much about streaming to my phone but u I have the same wmp11 set up.

I have a Motorola Defy which is a DLNA enabled device - I didn't need an app. When I fire up the DLNA program I can browse shared folders. I don't know if you can make compatible a phone that isn't sold as DLNA enabled. If you have the same operating system conflicts that I have, I think WMP11 solves it. I've not needed to explore sharing to the laptops yet as we've watched everything from the HTPC only so far but it did recognise WMP11 on another laptop when that was turned on and I confirmed it as an agent.