Saturday, September 25, 2004
Quick and Dirty Networked Media Player - A Complete Disaster
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 11:00 AM
Ever since I started using Snapstream's Beyond TV3, I've been looking for a way to get that video content up to my TV set. I've been looking at a few different commercial networked media players, but haven't pulled the trigger on anything yet (I've requested a few for review though). My wife Ashley wanted to watch a certain show, so I figured I'd give something a try: my laptop, a Fujitsu P5010D, has S-Video out on it, so I thought I'd try to connect it to the TV along with a minijack to stereo RCA outputs for audio.
When I hit the key combination on my laptop to enable the external video signal, it bluescreened. 8O Not an auspicious start! After recovering and a completely unhelpful error message about the problem because caused by an unknown device driver :roll: I tried it again. This time, it worked. I made the external display 800 x 600 in resolution, but as you can see from the photograph above there were black bars around the edge of the screen. I tried 640 x 480 but they didn't go away. I enabled Windows Media Player on the secondary monitor (the TV set) and put it into full screen mode. A few seconds after starting it the doorbell rang and I had to stop it - only to once again be frustrated by the unintuitive keyboard shortcuts for Windows Media Player. Control+P to play/pause? Why not something obvious like the space bar? And why don't the arrow keys jump the video forward and backward? I've been spoilt by Beyond TV3 and the FireFly remote - trying to control a video player with keyboard shortcuts is a ticket to misery.
Eventually Ashley gave up and disconnected the laptop from the TV set and decided to watch the show on the laptop. That should have worked, right? Guess again. Even though the laptop was showing a full 54 Mbps connection over 802.11g, the 720 x 480 resolution, 4000 kbps MPEG2 videos were too much for the bandwidth and once every minute or so the unit would sputter and skip. It never stopped to buffer, which makes me think it might have also been an issue of processing power. The laptop on batteries defaults to 600 mhz, so it might not have had enough CPU firepower to chew through the video.
And that was that - ultimately, this experiment reminded me of when I hooked up a computer to my TV set five years ago and tried a home-brewed media centre PC. It was noisy, dysfunctional, and cursed by software that wasn't meant to do what I was asking it to do. This experience was no different, and I'm once again looking for a stand-alone, networked media player (Ethernet wired preferred) with a remote control. Any suggestions?
When I hit the key combination on my laptop to enable the external video signal, it bluescreened. 8O Not an auspicious start! After recovering and a completely unhelpful error message about the problem because caused by an unknown device driver :roll: I tried it again. This time, it worked. I made the external display 800 x 600 in resolution, but as you can see from the photograph above there were black bars around the edge of the screen. I tried 640 x 480 but they didn't go away. I enabled Windows Media Player on the secondary monitor (the TV set) and put it into full screen mode. A few seconds after starting it the doorbell rang and I had to stop it - only to once again be frustrated by the unintuitive keyboard shortcuts for Windows Media Player. Control+P to play/pause? Why not something obvious like the space bar? And why don't the arrow keys jump the video forward and backward? I've been spoilt by Beyond TV3 and the FireFly remote - trying to control a video player with keyboard shortcuts is a ticket to misery.
Eventually Ashley gave up and disconnected the laptop from the TV set and decided to watch the show on the laptop. That should have worked, right? Guess again. Even though the laptop was showing a full 54 Mbps connection over 802.11g, the 720 x 480 resolution, 4000 kbps MPEG2 videos were too much for the bandwidth and once every minute or so the unit would sputter and skip. It never stopped to buffer, which makes me think it might have also been an issue of processing power. The laptop on batteries defaults to 600 mhz, so it might not have had enough CPU firepower to chew through the video.
And that was that - ultimately, this experiment reminded me of when I hooked up a computer to my TV set five years ago and tried a home-brewed media centre PC. It was noisy, dysfunctional, and cursed by software that wasn't meant to do what I was asking it to do. This experience was no different, and I'm once again looking for a stand-alone, networked media player (Ethernet wired preferred) with a remote control. Any suggestions?
