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[Von]

In my living room, I use a small Asus EeeBox PC. This works great for playing music with MC18, with Gizmo as a remote control.

Lately I have become more interested in using the PC for video as well. It is already connected to my TV via HDMI, but performance is not very good, to put it mildly. Lots of stuttering when playing back mid-to-high resolution video in MC as well as with VLC and other software. I would also love better playback of online video services.

I don't wish to buy a new computer for this. As I said, it works great for music, and it's super quiet. I just remembered that both my TV and my Blu-Ray player support DLNA, and now I wonder if that could be the solution. However, I do not wish to use the TV or Blu-Ray player to browse media files and control playback. I want to use MC to control everything.

Is this something that can be accomplished? Can I bypass my PC's limitations and enjoy smooth playback of mp4, VOB etc using MC18 and a DLNA-compliant device? Could it also work when I watch online video in a browser?

I have looked at this wiki article http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/DLNA, but it's not clear to me if I can achieve quality similar to watching a DVD on a stand-alone player.

Any ideas? Just to connect everything and try it out involves some serious furniture lifting, so I'm grateful for all input before I start!

[6233638]

Tools > Options > Media Network > Advanced has an option for "DLNA Controller" which allows Media Center to control playback on the DLNA device if it is supported, rather than having to use its interface.

This option immediately made DLNA far more interesting to me now, because the interface on most DLNA devices I have used is horrible - ugly graphics, slow navigation etc.
With DLNA control, I can just use JRemote on my iPad to control what's being played back on my devices, and control multiple devices just from the iPad.


I've actually just been experimenting with using DLNA to send video and audio to the Sony TVs in my house today, and have had mixed results though.

Here's the problem with DLNA: If your device supports the file as-is, then all it's using is network bandwidth. So if you have a file that your PC can't handle, but the DLNA device can, it should play smoothly. (assuming your network is fast enough)
But if it is not a format that the device supports, you either can't play it, or you need the PC to convert the file in realtime as it's playing back. That's not a big deal for audio, but is far more demanding for HD video than actually just playing it on the PC.


So far, I haven't got it all figured out for the Sony TVs here yet. The "Sony BD/TV" preset only streams DVD-quality video to the TVs by default, and it took a bit of hunting around before I was able to send HD video to them - but this is not native HD video, Media Center is converting the files in realtime, so the quality is worse, and my CPU usage skyrockets.

If I just put these files on a USB thumbdrive, the TV can play them back natively though, so there's no reason for it to be doing this conversion, I just have to figure out how to get it working.
If I tell Media Center not to convert the files, I just get an error on the TV saying it couldn't play the video.


So if your DLNA device supports everything natively, and works without any weird configuration required, it will do exactly what you want.
My TVs don't support MKV at all, but those are (mostly) just H.264 video inside an MKV container rather than an MP4 container, so there should be a way to convert that in realtime, without much CPU demand.

[Von]

Tools > Options > Media Network > Advanced has an option for "DLNA Controller" which allows Media Center to control playback on the DLNA device if it is supported, rather than having to use its interface.

Thanks, that's good news. Do you know what this feature is called, so that I can check whether my devices support it?

[csimon]

In my experience, manufacturers rarely put useful information like that in their manuals! The easiest thing to do probably is to try it. Enable DLNA Server and Controller in MC then see if the device pops up automatically in the Playing Now menu (give it up to a minute to appear, or restart MC and the device to make sure the DLNA broadcast is picked up).  If it does then your device does understand DLNA and at least you should be able to browse MC's library on that device.  Next thing is to select that device in MC's interface under Playing Now and send something to it.  If the device isn't a DLNA renderer or it doesn't understand the file format then you'll probably get an error dialog from MC "There was a problem controlling this DLNA device".

[Von]

Thank you for your input. I will try to connect everything and see what happens.