Media Centres

To a software/networks/gadget geek with a deep interest in music and film, the lure of having access to my music, videos, photos and a choice of independent radio anywhere in the house is just too much to resist. My CD collection has slowly been migrating to one of the servers in the garage for a couple of years now (I have a lot of CDs!) and my photography and occasional forays into video went digital years ago but finding ways to distribute these files around the house has occupied many an hour.

A couple of years ago, I bought first a Linksys WMA11B network media player (NMP) and installed its companion software on one of the PCs to act as the stream server. That never worked too well – the low (802.11b WiFi) network bandwidth restricted it to music playback only; photos took an age to appear and it had no support for video at all. Worst of all, its proprietary server software consumed far too much CPU overhead and was incompatible with other devices.

The Linksys was replaced fairly quickly with a D-Link DSM320 NMP that supports 802.11g (54Mbps) WiFi and works using open standards (UPNP) to replay music, videos, photos and streamed Internet radio stations. It also has a captive 100Mbps Ethernet connection. That worked well connected to a PC running the separate Windows Media Connector freebie (now incorporated into Windows Media Player 11). Music (including CD quality WAVs) played back fine over the WiFi connection and it was even possible to watch MPEG and DivX encoded movies – as long as you ignored the lack of lip-sync!