Stream Your Media
Information yearns to be free, but music and video long to be everywhere
There’s a lot of territory to cover here, but it boils down to this: Your media
(music, video, digital photos, television programming, and so on) origi-
nates from location A, and you want to enjoy it at location B.
A media-center extender can stream any digital content from one
room to another. If you don’t have Windows Media Center, there are a
host of products capable of streaming music, pre-recorded video, live orrecorded TV, music, and digital photos from your PC. A wide variety of
products can stream music from a PC, and a number of docking stations
will do the same from an iPod. If you’d like to watch TV programming
from a remote location or on your smartphone, you’ll want a location-
shift ing device such as the Slingbox.Choose a Media-Streaming Device
Choosing the right server is easy compared to fi nding the right tool
for streaming music, video, and digital photographs—there are just so
many options to choose from. Your fi rst step is to decide what you want
to stream and where you want to stream it.
A media-center extender, such as the Linksys $250 DMA2100 (or
an Xbox 360), can do it all, but these devices require that the host PC be
running a version of Windows that includes Windows Media Center.
Unfortunately, the latest (and most capable) media-center extenders
are not compatible with Windows XP. On the other hand, one of the
few features that renders Vista superior to Windows XP is its ability to
record and stream copy-protected content from your cable-TV system.
But there’s a major catch: You’ll need a CableCARD tuner in your PC,
and the only way to get one is as part of a new, prebuilt system. Satellite
TV customers are entirely out of luck—there’s no CableCARD equiva-
lent for satellite. A/V streamers such as Netgear’s EVA8000 ($350) or
the PlayStation 3 ($400) can do most everything that a media-center
extender can do— except stream encrypted television programming.
The most important aspects of a music-streaming system are audio
quality, the remote control, the soft ware for the host PC, support for
third-party services (such as Rhapsody and Pandora), and capacity forbuilding a multiroom system. Logitech’s Squeezebox (from $300) and
the Sonos Digital Music System (from $600) are tops in this category.Choose a Server
We’re using the term “server” rather loosely here. Traditionally, a server
is a specialized PC that resides at the heart of a network and provides
services to a number of connected client PCs. In a home-automation
system, the server can be anything from your desktop PC, to a headless
PC (meaning it has no display) running Windows Home Server, to a
network-attached storage (NAS) box that’s little more than a hard drive
with some logic and a network address.
Using your primary desktop PC as a server is fi ne, as long as no one
will be using it to run resource-intensive applications (such as games)
while someone else is relying on it to stream music or video. Many
people convert an old PC into a dedicated server when they upgrade
to a new machine. A light-duty server doesn’t need a fast CPU, and it
certainly doesn’t need the latest sound and videocard technology. You
will, on the other hand, want to make sure it has a gigabit NIC.
We were initially impressed with consumer-oriented mini servers that
run Microsoft ’s new Windows Home Server, such as the HP MediaSmart
EX475 ($700) because they’re small, quiet, and consume little power. A
recently discovered data-corruption bug aff ecting multidrive servers,
however, has cooled our enthusiasm. Microsoft says a fi x will be available
by June 2008, but we advise waiting for the dust to settle.QNAP’s TS-109 Pro is not only a fast NAS box, its feature
set rivals that of a full-fl edged server.The Sonos Digital Music System is the best multizone music-streaming
product we’ve encountered—well worth the $1,000 price tag for a
two-room system.THE^ DIGITAL
DOMICILE
48 | MAXIMUMPC | JUN 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com