Lately I've been trying out some alternative entertainment options. I've canceled my satellite television and have installed an antenna on my rooftop. I also built a Windows Media Center PC to act as a DVR/Internet TV box. Everything has been working great...on the one TV that connects directly to my Media Center PC. But what about the other two TV's in my house? Sure, I'm saving $70 a month by not having satellite, but my return on investment time line gets much longer if I build a Home Theater PC (HTPC) for each set.
A cheaper alternative for getting Internet TV delivered to a television set is to use a set-top box that you may already be using on that set: your game console. I happen to have an Xbox 360 attached to my downstairs TV, and have been serving up videos from my home server since the beginning of the summer. The integration between Windows Home Server and the 360 works great, but I'm limited to video files that exist on the server. I cannot play Hulu through the 360 or Netflix without an Xbox live gold membership. As you can probably tell by my canceling of satellite - I'm not crazy about recurring payments so I don't like the idea of a gold membership. However, I did run across an alternative method for a one-time $40 price-tag: PlayOn.
PlayOn, from MediaMall technologies uses a PC with a web browser and Windows Media Player 11 to stream internet video like Hulu and Netflix to uPnP compliant devices such as game consoles or PC's. By installing PlayOn on my Windows Home Server, I'm able to view Hulu, Netflix and YouTube directly on my Xbox 360. PlayOn is also compatible with PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, and (via the free Playit plugin), Windows 7 Media Center.
My experience with the tool has been somewhat mixed. I originally could not get Netflix to work on the 360 at all, and received an error message each time I tried to play a stream. After some e-mails with PlayOn support, I was eventually able to get it to work by starting PlayOn in "application mode" instead of as a service. I was told by PlayOn that "A small percentage of PC's block PlayOn for unknown reasons and there is not much else we can do to resolve it." Since then, however, a few reboots of the server seems to have fixed the issue and Netflix will stream when PlayOn is running as a service. However, a Netflix stream always fails on the first try after the Xbox boots. Subsequent tries work much better. However, when traffic volumes are heavy Netflix through PlayOn either gets quite jittery or buffers frequently. I don't have the same experience when streaming Netflix directly through the browser.
I've had almost identical Netflix jitter/buffer issues when running PlayOn through the Playit plug-in for Windows Media Center.
The Wii, however, was a different story altogether. Both Hulu and Netflix were unbearably jittery. This is probably due to the Wii being a wireless-only device, while my Xbox and HTPC are hard wired 100MB. It could get better, however, as the Wii is currently listed "in beta" for the PlayOn tool.
It's probably worth noting once again that the Netflix jitter/buffer issues on the Xbox and Media Center are intermittent, which is why I chalk it up to bandwidth contention on the Internet.
I do think that for $40, the flexibility that PlayOn gives me on my different TVs will pay off in the long run. I'm also interested in eventually extending the capabilities of my PlayOn media server by experimenting with some of the plugins that are also available. If you've tried any, let me know how they work.
Got an idea for a topic? E-mail me at toptoad@techonadime.net.
3 comments:
Web casting, or broadcasting over the internet, is a media file (audio-video mostly) distributed over the internet using streaming media technology. Streaming implies media played as a continuous stream and received real time by the browser (end user). Streaming technology enables a single content source to be distributed to many simultaneous viewers. Streaming video bandwidth is typically calculated in gigabytes of data transferred. It is important to estimate how many viewers you can reach, for example in a live webcast, given your bandwidth constraints or conversely, if you are expecting a certain audience size, what bandwidth resources you need to deploy.
To estimate how many viewers you can reach during a webcast, consider some parlance:
One viewer: 1 click of a video player button at one location logged on
One viewer hour: 1 viewer connected for 1 hour
100 viewer hours: 100 viewers connected for 1 hour…
Typically webcasts will be offered at different bit rates or quality levels corresponding to different user’s internet connection speeds. Bit rate implies the rate at which bits (basic data units) are transferred. It denotes how much data is transmitted in a given amount of time. (bps / Kbps / Mbps…). Quality improves as more bits are used for each second of the playback. Video of 3000 Kbps will look better than one of say 1000Kbps. This is just like quality of a image is represented in resolution, for video (or audio) it is measured by the bit rate.
Andy -
Um. ok. Thanks for your unsolicited commercial.
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