dlna - any thoughts on this

Hi:

Anyone had any experience with dlna certified products? I'm looking at setting up a 'digital home' and the interoperability dlna suggests seems to be an advantage - but all you really get from the dnla website are vague things like "the devices talk to each other". Not much help.


fyi - I'm looking at a dlna certified NAS that will be wired to a few dlna TVs, PS3 etc - I just can't work out where dnla requires a media converter like a PS3 or can I plug the cat5e directly into the device (the dlna tv I'm looking at has a network cable port).


Fortress staff just look at me strangely when I mention the term. Computer centres were little better.


Thanks in advance.

I doubt you'll find that sort of stuff at a place like Fortress. They are far too mainstream. Most places in the computer centres are little better. The concepts of home automation and entertainment system integration are nowhere near as common in HK as in, say, North America.


Question: Are you looking at entertainment device integration? That is Media Library, presentation devices, universal remote. Or are you looking at "home automation"? That is integrated light and thermostat control among other things.


If you are looking for the entertainment stuff, I can help. I have a pretty nifty setup myself (media library, HTPC, etc...) and have helped customers set up whole or partial systems.


If you are looking for home automation, you could do worse than reading the beginning of this recent article: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/home-automation-insteon,2308.html

Axpt:

To answer your question:

I'm not after automation - luckily Hong Kong flats are small enough that I can pretty much reach everything from the centre of the room!


So I'm after a simple and easy way to share my digital media across 3 tvs in separate rooms. Also, I'd like to have a certain amount of future-proofing in what I buy. I've learnt from experience that spending a little more on the features you think you'll never need is wise - as those features soon become important/vital.


At the moment everything is wifi and my laptop moves around plugging in to different elements to make it work. I'd like to remove the laptop from the equation.


Here's what I'm planning:


NAS that will be always on.


On the holidays, I'll hard wire the flat with Cat 5E (or ideally 6) cable to the three rooms with TV.


The lounge room has the PS3 which will act as a Digital Media Adapter and has satisfactory on-board media centre navigation.


Two bedroom's with TVs that will be hooked up to something like Zyxel's DMA 1000. The Zyxel has some resident media centre style software as well for browsing the NAS.


As I said all will be hard wired and all devices are supposed to be giga ethernet capable.


I could also use something like twonky to manage this setup push media to various devices. For ease and simplicity, I'm looking at dlna products for the NAS, the Zyxel DMAs and the PS3. I was looking at getting TVs with dlna as well, but for the extra cost, I'm much better getting the cheaper TV with the same specs -sans dlna - and buying the Zyxel's as converters. That way the basis of the network will get along well with each other.


My only problem is NAS size. I'm looking at 2TB to start off with but figure that'll fill pretty quickly once the wife realises she can watch Sex in the City on demand!


Thanks for the offer of help. I may take you up on that.Most of this won't happen until mid-August, but I am by no means an expert at this - I've done a lot of reading about this but "A little knowledge... " as the saying goes!

Well, sounds like you know what you're doing. ;) Hardwiring is definitely the way to go when it comes to movies. I have done streaming over wireless and it's just not good enough IMHO. Since the first home server I built way back in 2001 or so I have never looked back. Central storage is so superior it's not even funny. A NAS for a setup like yours is totally the way to go.


I cannot recommend Netgear ReadyNAS highly enough. This used to be "Infrant" before the company was bought by Netgear. I have had mine for 2-3 years now and have installed a smaller variant for a customer or two. A bit pricey but totally future proof.


The cool thing is that you can start off with one drive and then expand. ReadyNAS runs this technology called X-RAID which adds expandability to traditional RAID 1 and RAID 5. You can also upgrade the drives to higher capacity and it will expand the volume on the fly. I started with 4 x 320GB and now run 4 x 1TB. WITH data continuity.


In your case I would recommend the NV+ (or its replacement the NVX) for a 4 drive NAS or even the Pro (6 drives).


Product page: http://www.readynas.com/?cat=27 . Check out the the "60-second primer to X-RAID" video top right.

FAQ. If you give this a read you'll have all the knowledge you need to buy and use: http://www.readynas.com/forum/faq.php

A note: only use drives from the compatibility list.



My setup is basically:

- NAS. ReadynNAS NV+. Always on. This has a share for my wife, one for me, one for our personal pics and videos and one for movies. That way whichever computer we are on, "My Documents/Documents" is always the same.

- Gigabit switches with Jumbo Frame support. 3com.

- Laptops and desktops connected with Cat6 and Cat5e or wireless. Intel Gigabit NICs in all of them.

- HTPC running Vista Home Premium and Media Center. This "drives" the TV.

- Media center add-on called MediaBrowser. A must if you have many movies. http://www.mediabrowser.tv/

- Program called Media Center Master to fetch and organize movie metadata. http://forums.mediacentermaster.com/index.php

- Universal remote: Logitech Harmony One. http://www.logitech.com/harmony . Fabulous device that sets all components to the correct settings for an activity with one button press. My wife loves the fact that she doesn't need to know what "HDMI" is. She just needs to know the "Watch TV" button and whatnot..


Ping me if you have any questions. Glad to help. I can also do on-site consulting for a fee.

Thanks for your help. I'll look into ReadyNas.

I started retrofitting an on PC as a HTPC, but didn't go through with it as I'd rather run everything from the NAS and use thin clients to convert the media for display.


I cant say I'm looking forward to the skin scraping and frustrating task of wiring up the place, but I figure it'll be worth it. I am thinking of getting on of those black and decker gizmos that finds wires etc, so I can try to keep my cat6 away from EM fields created by the mains power.

Thin clients are fun, as long as they run a decent app. On the other hand Media Center can be "completed" with some nice add-ons that blow those little media streaming boxes out of the water. Apart from Mediabrowser you have http://xbmc.org/ and others.


Certainly you can make a very small HTPC which is still a "real PC". A second hand laptop would do as well. The only big concern is noise. Many of the thinnest laptops have an annoying fan whine. Thin laptop -> tiny fan spinning very fast.


You'd need:

- Some sort of small case. Personally I'm partial to Silverstone HTPC cases because they are the same width as HiFi components and look like them. Makes the HTPC look good in your entertainment center/shelf/bench. The thinnest ones aren't much thicker than a DVD player.

- A processor. Latest gen Celeron is more than enough. Get a fanless cooler.

- 2 gigs or ram. 1 gig is probably enough but at today's prices why skimp?

- Fanless video card; Radeon HD 2400 class is more than enough.

- 2½ inch drive. SSD if you have money to burn.

- Fan controller(s) to keep fan noise below hearing threshold.

- Power supply with 120mm "silent" fan. Even better is fanless PSU like Silverstone Nightjar.




Note that getting Windows Media Center to do more than plain vanilla stuff requires quite a bit of tweaking. Note also that a lot of the apps you need to make it really nice are open source and community supported. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Some are really good. But unless the developer is very helpful support is your own business.


I have spent countless hours on this and it's still not 100% the way I want it, or stable. This stuff is sadly still a bit bleeding edge. I blame the content companies. They want us to buy the DVD and shut the hell up. ;)

That's one of the reasons I decided to forget about building my HTPC. I've got a laptop with vista premuim and the media centre on that has a tendency to crash. In fact, the laptop's media centre rarely gets used now, I prefer to navigate though explorer and play the file I want - as media centre codecs etc are not as all-encompassing as I'd like. I've got a Philips remote for the media centre, but find it easier to just use the logitech nano vx on the sofa cushion to navigate the comp. Once again, not sexy, but covers all the bases for me.


So I'll use he PS3 once I get everything set up. I'm happy with the GUI on the PS3 - not sexy, somewhat clunky if your media is stored strangely, but still easily navigated.

Yeah I hear you about the stability. Still, there's a bit of a difference between a dedicated HTPC and running it as an app on your "general use" machine. I will agree that on my "normal" machine MC is not the most stable.


My HTPC, though, runs only Media Center and Skype. That's it. No other apps installed apart from codecs and Media Center add-ons. I even ripped out all the bits of Windows I could. There's no file indexing, no antivirus, no nothing. So stability is pretty darned good. I can't remember the last MC crash. All it does it goes to standby, wakes up, plays media, goes to standby. Rinse and repeat.


BTW if you need one set of codecs that will make pretty much all your movies work in MC, WMP or whatnot, look no further than http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm . KLite has everything you need. Another option is to use VLC media player, which will play most anything.

I have a dlna streaming setup.


I use a Synology DS408 NAS, with 4TB storage (4 x 1TB Seagate HDDs) which I purchased in HK. Currently the 4TB is arrayed as a RAID5.


I use a PS3 as the player, and it is very good at streaming. I like the set up and the GUI isn't bad, though not as good as my Apple TV. However the Apple TV is extremely hardware limited for HD content, so I don't really use it anymore. PS3 has lots of processing power and gigabit ethernet. I use gigabit ethernet connections today, and I'm looking to add a solid powerline networking arrangement. Wireless is not reliable for HD content streaming, and barely reliable for SD content. In my experience, I find when someone has trouble streaming to a PS3 (or other), it is generally not a PS3 or NAS problem, but a bandwidth problem.


I would deem my setup nearly perfect except for one big thing - the PS3 will not support playback of .MKV files. The .MKV format is just a "container" as they say, so I'm just put them in a .MPG container, which is an easy process but I'd rather that .MKV's just work natively.