This thread is all about playing or streaming media (e.g. DivX/.avi/.mp3 etc files) on a TV or Home Theater system. You would not think it was that hard, or that complicated (and of course, technically, it isn’t) but I’ve been on a very long voyage of adventure getting this right – or as right as you can make it with current products on the US market).
This is not really a how-to guide, but more of a description of what I looked at and tried, and how I made this work for me. Hopefully it will save others a lot of wasted time and money by providing hints on what you can do, and the good and the bad features of the technology I tried.
The starting point
The starting point really is having a TV, in my case a 52″ Sony Bravia LCD, but it can be anything reasonably recent. You also need to replay audio, so an amplifier and speakers (the closer you can get to home theater the better). Obviously, if you have DivX/.avi files you want to play, you already have a computer, and most likely a broadband Internet connection.
The missing link
The part that’s missing is a way of playing back those files (for convenience I’ll refer to them as AVI files from now on) on your TV. You can play them back on your computer, but you probably don’t want to watch video media for long on your PC. (Incidentially, one of the most versatile media players for the PC itself is VLC media player. It’s a free download from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ - it will work on practically any operating system and play almost any media)
The missing link is the mechanism for taking AVI files and playing them on your TV, with full control over playback, fast forward, rewind and so on, aka a ‘Media Player’. This is essentially a box that connects to your TV and audio system (or the built in audio on your TV) and works like a DVD player for AVI files. Actually, that’s qute a good analogy. A media player hooks up like a DVD player, but instead of playing DVD’s it plays AVI files.
Getting the picture to your TV
Seriously, unless you have legacy equipment you just have to reuse, connect your media player to yout TV with HDMI. Even if the AVI files aren’t HiDef today, they will be soon. HDMI is really, really easy to hook up, wire, and use, and almost everything has it today. HDMI supports all modes up to HD 1080p. If you really can’t use HDMI, you can use component (5 wires in place of 1 for each connection).
Getting Media Files to your media player from your computer
There are four ways of getting media to your media player:
- Burn it onto a CD or DVD, and use a DVD player that will play DivX/AVI (I haven’t considered that option as burning media is just too clunky for more that occasional use)
- Put media on a USB drive or an external USB hard drive and connect it to the media player (sometimes useful but still a bit clunky)
- Network the media player and your computer wirelessly
- Network the media player and your computer using a wired network
For the sake of this exercise, really only 4 and 5 count as we want a permanent solution.
The problem with wireless
It’s very tempting to go with a wireless solution for connection things together, but for me it’s only a real last resort. 802.11X technology is great, in certain circumstances, but media streaming isn’t really an appropriate use. Unless you have perfect conditions, wireless connection will cause more problems that you really want to deal with, and I’d strongly recommend going wired with Category 5 or 6 structured wiring. It’ll make your life much easier, and with HD becoming more and more prevalent, almost essential.
As you can probably guess, I used a wired network; I am fortunate in that I wired my entire house with Cat-5E several years ago. This is a big advantage for this kind of project.
The Media Player (and Media Server)
So far, so good – we know what we need (a media player) and we know how to get the AVI files from a computer to the media player. This really leaves the seemingly simple problem of buying a media player and off we go. The problem is that this seemingly simple part is riddled with problems, and almost nobody knows how to make it work properly.
In the next post, I’ll be talking about the various forms of media players available and the drawbacks of each.
