Streaming Your Media, Explored in Show 61
In FrequencyCast Show 61, Carl and Pete took a close look at the options for video and audio streaming around your home. Here's the transcript of our feature.
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Listen to FrequencyCast Show 61 - Media Streaming Explored
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Focus on Media Streaming:
In Show 61, Pete and Carl took a fresh look at the latest media streaming technology, and how to get music, photos and video pumped wirelessly around your home. Here's the transcript:
Carl:
So we're now going to focus in something more exciting than ever before, and why do I say that? - because I had to go Pete's house for that one. So what was it I was going to see?
Pete:
Well, we were talking about streaming video, and you had fun at my place, didn't you?
Carl:
Yep.
Pete:
Now, the first thing I showed you was a Western Digital NetStore My Book NAS, wasn't it?
Carl:
You did. It was a very neat little box that sat on the corner of the floor in your hallway.
Pete:
So this little box was my NAS box. Do you know what a NAS is?
Carl:
I used to know - what was it again?
Pete:
Network-Attached Storage, so it's a back up device. It sits there and backs up the contents of my main desktop PC and my laptop onto a hard disc, without me having to press buttons. But also it's a very handy device for streaming media, because it uses DLNA.
Carl:
Of course.
Pete:
And to get us started, we started having a play around with some kit, didn't we?
Carl:
Yep, we sure did. Now, what was the first thing we played with?
Pete:
So this is a Logitech Squeezebox. It is effectively an internet radio. Let's just turn it on.
Logitech Squeezebox Internet and Streaming Radio
(audio extract plays)
Carl:
Well, it's a big, black box. It looks like a conventional AM radio that you'd find in your kitchen really. It looks sleek. You've got Now Playing, My Music, Internet Radio, My Apps. You've got softkey touches one to six - that'd be like fast tuning, I'm thinking. You've got a tuning knob or dial. You have a volume control. You have the on/off power switch. You've got a play/pause/forward and a rewind button, interesting. You've got Home, Alarm and More, and then you've got a back and a forwards button there on the side. You have a headphone on the right-hand side, there's a headphone connector. At the very back, you've got - is that an Ethernet connector? - oh, look at me, knowing that. You've got an In, which is the 3.5 ml input - I don't know what that would be for, radio, microphone - I don't know, who knows?
Pete:
That'd be for a line in, so you could plug in an mp3 player to it.
Carl:
I knew that.
Pete:
What's key to me though is this lovely little control. If I do this, it beeps. I'm just rotating the control, and we can see what's going on on the colour screen here. So let me just move to internet radio, first of all; let's just do the standard stuff. Internet radio, press the button, and you can see we've got Local, Music, Talk, Search, World, whatever. So we can look for local, and see what stations are local to us, and this is just using the internet, so here we've got Aberdeen, Birmingham, Cardiff, London, Guernsey. So this is all the radio stations that are broadcasting a streaming service over the internet. Of course, the obvious one we should be looking for is ...
Carl:
FrequencyCast?
Pete:
OK, let's have a look ... searching, here we go, Radio FrequencyCast. If we press the button, in theory ...
(audio extract plays)
Pete:
So there you go. That is show 59 streaming on our internet radio service, and that's available without any faffing about on the Logitech Squeezebox. Pretty impressive?
Carl:
Yeah, I am impressed. When do I get this? I'll have to go and listen to it one day.
Pete:
OK, so that's the streaming element of it, but the clever bit is where you go back to the main screen and you've got My Music. I'll press the little button there, and what this is now doing is, this is getting this from the network, so it's not physically got any media connected in. It's doing it all over Wi-Fi and I can find an artist, so in theory ... there you go, I'm scrolling down on my artists there. So here we go - see if this guy sounds familiar. So here's a bit of music from my hard disc.
(audio extract plays)
Pete:
Newstime in Fre ... no, we've already done that, haven't we?
Carl:
I'm amazed at how sad you are, that you actually have a newsbed on your My Favourites. Actually, it's very good sound quality, I've got to be honest. It's only mono, and that actually sounds really nice. I'm a bit averse to mono sound, because I've got two years, so I like to use both of them properly, but that actually sounds very good.
Pete:
So that's the audio side of things covered. That was fairly nice, wasn't it?
Carl:
It certainly was.
Pete:
And then we moved onto the TV and video side of things, didn't we?
Carl:
OK, yeah, and you kicked off by showing me your little Apple TV box hooked up to your Sony TV, didn't you?
Pete:
Now, I'm not going to talk too much about this, because we did a full in-depth review back in show 52 (See: Apple TV Review), but just to show you that streaming works, this is connected to my telly using HDMI and it's got Wi-Fi in it, so I can go in and I can play movies from iTunes, connect to the internet for YouTube, podcasts, MobileMe, Flickr or radio. What I want to show you is Computers. Go into Computers, and what does it say there?
Carl:
Pete's music, under the Computer setting. It's got four settings. It's got some images at the top there, so obviously you can get to all sorts of crazy things. There's even images of family and friends there, isn't there?
Pete:
There we'll go. So you'll see, if you're clever, that the same stuff that was on the Logitech Squeezebox is also available on my telly through the Apple TV box.
Carl:
Oh yes.
Pete:
So in theory, if I were to go into the same folder, I should find the same piece of music that we were playing earlier.
(audio extract plays)
Carl:
Newstime on FrequencyCast.
Pete:
So you can see, I've got the same stuff available on my computer, on my TV and on the Squeezebox.
Carl:
And this is all without cables dragging right the way round the house.
Pete:
Right, now do you want to see something impressive?
Carl:
No no - I want to go now.
Pete:
My iPhone, in my hand - I'm going to take a picture of you, in my hand. I'm going to take a picture of you. It's a lovely picture of you.
Carl:
I look just like a polythene bag.
Pete:
Let's look at the photo.
Carl:
Good grief! - that was quick! You've got the same images on your phone on your TV already?
Pete:
There you go, so this is a feature built into the iPhone and iPad. So I can just flick through my photo collection and wirelessly it's just appearing on my TV.
Carl:
But that's just phenomenal, isn't it?
Pete:
And it also works this way, so if I go into the iPod stuff, and let's say I want to listen to a podcast ... podcasts, let's have a look. So here's a list of all my podcasts: FrequencyCast, the last show we did was Show No 60, so here we go. I can play Show 60 on my i ...
(audio extract plays)
So I can play the podcast on my iPhone, or by pressing that button there ...
(audio extract plays)
Carl:
Good grief - and that automatically mutes it on your phone? - so it just sends it straight to the TV, and you don't have to worry about anything else. I'm suitably impressed. Straight away everything goes straight to your TV. I'm very impressed. Have you got more for me?
Pete:
Oh yes. So this is just the Apple TV plugged into my TV using Wi-Fi. But the TV itself, this is a lovely Sony Bravia TV, has built-in internet as well.
Carl:
And how's that connected? - via an aerial, or on the internet as well?
Pete:
Built-in Wi-Fi.
Carl:
Oh, so it's just built in?
Pete:
So if I press the home button, I get the main TV menu. So I've got my analogue TV, my digital TV and all my various inputs, so I've got the line ins and the HDMIs and the like. The clever bit is where you get into here, so we have the network setting. If I scroll to video, which is where obviously the really interesting stuff happens, let's see what we've got. So what we have here is: Video on Demand from Curiosity, BBC iPlayer, Demand 5, Sky News, Love Film, Sony Entertainment, Eurosport, YouTube, Blip TV, Forward - there's just pages and pages of stuff, agreed?
Carl:
Absolutely.
Pete:
So you can just go to YouTube, it's actually loaded up the YouTube interface, and we can see what the most popular YouTube video clips are. Let's see what's most popular at the moment. OK, so here's a list - Thug Jedi, Kim Kardashian wins the Super Bowl - let's give that one a try for the sake of it. Press the little button, and it says loading.
(audio extract plays)
Pete:
So what do you reckon? - fairly smooth, no judder?
Carl:
Very smooth - no juddering at all.
Pete:
Subscription-free, so I've got obviously YouTube, BBC iPlayer, Channel 5, Sky News - they're all subscription-free, and there's movies if you want to pay for them, so things like Love Film, which is a subscriptions service, or some of the on demand movies. So this is purely from the TV, no set-top boxes involved, no nothing else. TV connected to the internet over Wi-Fi.
Carl:
Wow!
Pete:
But that's not half of it. Let me continue scrolling down. If you see here, I have Netstore.
Carl:
What's that, then?
Pete:
That is that.
Carl:
Ooh - so that's direct to this thing out in the hall, which is a bit like a Home Hub?
Pete:
So from here, I can see video. Scroll down to video, and if I go into, let's take a look - by folder, so I can see all of the folders of all of the video content I have anywhere in the house, all neatly displayed out for me, so I can find a particular piece of video, open it up and hit play, and be watching telly.
Carl:
So this has got all your entertainment needs, both music and video.
Pete:
Now, there is one slight fly in the ointment.
Carl:
What's that, then?
Pete:
And that is, this Sony Bravia TV can't cope with a high number of video formats. So you probably know, there's loads of different video formats. There's AVI and DivX and xVid and MOV and Apple's formats, and all the various different formats. Unfortunately, this TV can't handle the common ones like DivX and xVid.
Carl:
That's bizarre - why not?
Pete:
It just doesn't have the software built in, which is really irritating. When I found that out, when I'd wired all this up, and it can see all the folders and video clips, but everything I was going into was saying, "unsupported file format".
Carl:
So what - can you convert them?
Pete:
I found a really clever bit of software, after a bit of faffing around, called Wild Media Server, and effectively what that does is it runs on the computer, and it will live transcode any format. So whatever video you've got, it will just transcode it and play it on the telly for you.
Carl:
Well, that saves a lot, but you need to have your computer on for this, do you?
Pete:
You do need to have your computer on. So if I go back one screen, there's my Netstore. If I scroll down one, I've got something that says Home Compaq, which is my main PC. If I now go in, I get exactly the same thing, so I get all the folders as we saw before, all the various TV shows, but now I can actually play them. So here you go, you can see the kind of stuff I've been watching. I've got one of our favourites here, Chuck, so let me just fire up an episode here, press the button. Now this is again streaming straight over the home network and doing transcoding.
(audio extract plays)
Carl:
So it's got a little dial in the top right-hand corner, it's just waiting to do something. Wow, that was quick.
Pete:
There you go - nice and smooth?
Carl:
Definitely, and it's actually live now, it's actually transcoding as we're watching.
Pete:
How is that for impressive? - so that's my entire video library all on the telly.
Carl:
Phenomenal.
Pete:
Now, did you see any judder?
Carl:
No, I didn't actually, which was very good, because that wasn't only streaming, it was transcoding at the same time.
Pete:
What I would say though is, I've noticed on one particular TV show, I see some judder. What's one of my favourite geeky shows at the moment?
Carl:
That'd be the Big Bang Theory, wouldn't it, because that's your lifestyle really - no women. I'm surprised you don't have an inflatable personality.
Pete:
Now, what's unique about the Big Bang Theory?
Carl:
There's only one fit bird in it.
Pete:
There is that. I was more thinking of the intro sequence.
Carl:
It's all graphics, isn't it?
Pete:
And it's a little bit clever. Now, we'll see if we can do this with playing the audio here. What I'm doing is, I'm watching an old episode of the Big Bang Theory. Now, at the very beginning, what happens over the TV? - there's a song that goes da-di-da, and there's a piece of music, and they show different frames of ...
Carl:
Different frames of the history of the world. They have an image of Einstein, there's a nuclear bomb going off - things like that.
Pete:
And what I've noticed - let's see if we can just fast-forward to it, but I will show you the video, and you'll notice the judder, because it is just so many frames, 25 frames a second, one image every frame, the TV can't actually keep up with it.
Carl:
So it's only extreme production techniques that are likely to be a problem with watching television this way?
(audio extract plays)
Pete:
It's the only time I've ever seen it do it. It doesn't do it watching ordinary telly, it's just on that sequence where there is so much visual activity and so many frame changes.
Anyway, that was video covered. Now it's time to look at photos, with me displaying a lovely snap from our office Christmas party.
Carl:
Why wasn't I invited?
Pete:
OK, so here we go - a nice, full screen picture up on the screen, up on the telly. So you can do slide shows and flick through and search by folder or by year or by date or whatever else. So is that a nice picture of our Christmas meal?
Carl:
It's very good, yeah. Are you going to impress me with it?
Pete:
I am going to impress you. Press the blue button on the remote for me. Now, what's appeared in the top right-hand corner of that?
Carl:
Oh look - it's a little map! Oh, good grief. It tells you the location of the actual photograph, and you can zoom in and out. That's actually a map of the world, and now it's got to a map of England and now it's just cities, and now it's towns, now it's the road.
Pete:
So what this has done, this particular photo was taken on my iPhone, but we could have taken it on any digital camera using that little Eye-Fi card that does location. So the photo has location information, and on the TV it's worked out that it has some latitude and longitude stuff, and popped up on the screen Google Maps, so there you go - you can see the exact place on a map where that photo was taken.
Carl:
That's very clever. OK, so why is the Galaxy Tab out?
Pete:
Oh yeah, just to kind of prove a point about this thing called DLNA that we were talking about, I can get my Galaxy Tab. When we were doing our review of the Tab for Show 60, we went through the applications. Try just tapping on that one for me.
Carl:
The AllShare, is it?
Pete:
So what I've now got is effectively the sharing application that comes free with the Galaxy Tab. So what I have here is a list of devices.
Carl:
Oh yeah?
Pete:
So what do I have down my left-hand column?
Carl:
My Device, Netstore, Office Compaq, and then on the right-hand side you have My Device and Bravia.
Pete:
Right, so what I can do is look at the Netstore device, so I click on Netstore. On my Tab, I can do My Device, and what this is now doing is using my Galaxy Tab to talk over Wi-Fi to the network-attached storage device, and it will show me all of the content that's available over the network that I can view. So instead of watching it on the telly, or streaming it on a little Logitech Squeezebox there, I can actually sit and do this on my Tab.
Carl:
So it's a little how you were using the iPhone before.
Pete:
I was actually using the iPhone to broadcast a picture over the network to the TV. Here I'm using the device to pull content from the network to watch on the tablet, so I can take this and read this lying in bed or on the loo or whatever. I've got a portable device that will do my photos, my music and my video all on one device.
Carl:
So in other words, what you're saying, if you were watching a film downstairs and you had the urge to go to the loo, you could actually take it upstairs on the Galaxy Tab and not miss any of it?
Pete:
And you can even be more clever than that. Let's say I'm doing this, let's saying I'm looking at a video that I've got local to this device. So let me just see if I can do this, let's be fairly clever here. So I can also go the other way, so a piece of video or a photo I've taken on the Tab I can share out and be watching it on the tablet, come back downstairs and decide I want to watch it on the main TV. So I find, there we go - that particular piece of video there, press that.
(audio extract plays)
So you can see I'm streaming music and video from the Galaxy Tab hassle-free, no extra software to install, just press play and it appears on the telly - how cool?
Carl:
Very good.
Pete:
So that was our little look at what you can do with streaming tech. Impressed?
Carl:
I am actually very impressed, but one little thing that perplexes me is, how does it all work?
Pete:
Well, the key is that little thing called DLNA.
Carl:
OK, which stood for?
Pete:
Digital Living Network Alliance, and what it is is, it's a standard for media streaming.
Carl:
But what actually is it?
Pete:
So what it is, it's a protocol that effectively runs on bits of kit. So on my little NAS storage device, or indeed on a PC or even on a mobile phone, the DLNA service runs and allows other devices to get in and talk to it. So you can have computers and NAS drives acting as the main storage, running DLNA, and then you can get devices like digital TVs, PCs, tablet devices, things like the Sony PS3, set-top boxes, Blu-Ray players, the whole bit. If they're DLNA certified, they can pull and stream media from the various DLNA servers.
Carl:
So they are really all just talking to each other without you involved.
Pete:
I'd like you to just look at this here email from a confused bunny called Julie Bell.
Carl:
"When I've been looking at various streaming devices, it will always say things like, Samba client compatible, and uPnP compatible, and DLNA" - ah, we know what that one is now - "and Twonkey server software needed." I like that one - Twonkey, that's excellent, I like that - do that more often. "All this is like a foreign language to me" - you think it's foreign, I'm reading it! So Pete, I think someone's in desperate need, of some translation for a start.
Pete:
Okey-dokey, well let's go through it. DLNA we've covered. uPnP stands for Universal Plug'n'Play, and that's the protocol that allows devices to talk to each other, not necessarily anything to do with streaming technology, and DLNA and uPnP kind of go together. So it's assumed, if it's DLNA, then it's also uPnP. So that basically means the two of them can talk together.
Carl:
OK, that's that one done. What about Twonkey?
Pete:
Twonkey is a piece of software that runs on PC, Mac, Linux and Android, and it's a sharing server. So effectively it does the same kind of job as a DLNA server, it just pulls it all together and makes for a nice, easy piece of distribution software. (see www.twonky.com)
Carl:
Right, OK - let me get this clear. What if I'm looking to buy something, what do I need to be aware of?
Pete:
OK, a couple of things worth looking out for. Definitely look for something that supports DLNA. It should have a logo on it saying DLNA certified. If it doesn't, there's a list of everything that's compatible at DLNA.org.
Carl:
OK, thank you.
Pete:
Also bear in mind another piece of terminology that might come up - Bonjour.
Carl:
Oh, bonjour! Ça va?
Pete:
Bonjour. Now that's Apple's own technology, that's their sharing software. So if you see the name Bonjour, that's kind of their rival, if you like, to uPnP.
Carl:
Right.
Pete:
And if you are looking at doing streaming video, be very careful of one thing - make sure you check the formats of the video that are supported. If you're going to watch a lot of Xvid or DivX, make sure your box copes with it, because a lot of them don't, as we found out with our Sony telly.
Carl:
That's excellent. Can you get some stuff on the website, just to confirm prices, etc and so forth?
Pete:
Certainly. Go to our shownotes, there'll be something there by the time you're listening to this.
Carl:
Excellent. And what's that in your little package of packages? - lots of little devices you've bought with you today - what are they?
Pete:
I have to show you this. While we're talking about streaming, this little device here - USB dongle, plugs into your laptop. That's a USB receiver, plugs into this device here, and what it does is it lets you stream the output of your laptop onto this device, which then connects through HDMI to your telly. The practical upshot, if you've got something on your laptop, you can watch it on your telly wirelessly streamed using this. You can also use it for presentations, PowerPoints, that kind of thing. It's got a range of about 20 feet, and it also supports that little connector there, which is VGA for putting it up on computer monitors that don't have high def sockets.
Carl:
OK, I can see why that would be handy.
Pete:
720p HD streaming wirelessly from a laptop to a telly, and it's a really nice little solution. It's called the EZ View, under £100, and there's a full review and pics up on our show notes.
Carl:
Awesome.
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