razmaspaz

After I got the TV the first thing I wanted to check out was the DLNA capabilities it has.  Its taken a while because standing in my way was a pesky little home wiring project, and a time sink known affectionately as having a baby.  The baby is settling into a routine, and the last wires were pulled through the walls this morning, so its on to the fun part.  I’ve been testing out Twonky Media Server.

Twonky is a DLNA reference implementation and it serves up media on Mac, Linux, and PC.  Its esentially a web server that keeps a database of all of your media and streams it on demand.  So far I’ve been able to use it to view pictures, watch youTube, and play MP3s from my MacBook Pro.  All of this is great, but the real challenge is video.  Its been a dream for a while to have a system for watching movies from a server on the TV without a vga cable strung across the room.  DLNA seems to deliver on this promose.  The biggest hurdle is getting over video formats.  Video_TS, ISO, MPEG-4, wmv, H.264, whats a technically savvy but video stupid guy to do?  Ideally you would rip your DVD to thefile system as an ISO or something and the server would serve up whatever format was necessary.  Thats close, very close actually, but not quite there.  And the not quite there is a royal pain in the ass.

I think this afternoon I will have all the kinks worked out and a m4v file will be streamed to my TV with sound played over my stereo.  I don’t have rear speakers wired up in the ceiling yet, so I won’t be able to verify 5.1 sound, but soon, very soon.  Keep your fingers crossed and I will report back soon.