Ah, well, you see... the Streamium I've got is different in a few ways, not just the fact that it isn't (currently) UPnP. For instance, it only does music. It's actually the MC-i250.
I wanted a complete mini hi-fi system for the bedroom, and that's what I've got. So the interface is completely built into the system, displayed on its LED display and can't be changed (except by a firmware update).
Price wasn't a big factor for me, because I don't think there are still any competitors: if you want a wifi all-in-one hifi that streams your music from your PC, this is the only one I'm aware of (or potentially other similar Philips products)
I do have two other devices though: I bought a Netgear MP101 for the living room; from the various forums for that, people have mixed feelings about it, as do I. It is UPnP, but again it has its own internal display, and you can't change that. It's cheaper than the MVP, but only does music and doesn't connect to a telly; and that's what I originally wanted.
But because I really wasn't that happy with that, I then bought the Pinnacle Showcenter, figured that since it was right next to the telly anyway, the fact that you needed the telly on to browse music wasn't actually that big a deal. Plus it had the bonus that I could browse photos and videos if I really wanted to. (I'd looked at it originally, but at the time it didn't come with wireless, and that had changed in the meantime). The Showcenter isn't UPnP, though, but as it happens, I'm quite pleased with the software you get with it. The device certainly isn't perfect, but it's clear that Pinnacle are supporting it a bit better than Netgear are supporting their device. And because the networking side of it is actually quite simple (it's basically just webpages, generated using PHP!, which you can actually fairly easily tweak yourself) there are already open source equivalents available.
In terms of what my code did, it does change the interface a little, in that it basically exposes the view schemes to the Streamium. So where the Philips software (and MusicMatch's software is pretty much the same, whether you're using MusicMatch's UPnP support or its MC-i250 support) pretty much only allows you to browse by artist, album, genre, I've been able to set it up so I can browse pretty much how I like,
There's a big limitation though: the MC-i250 refers to everything using something like an 8-digit number (can't remember how many digits off the top of my head) which means that in practice you can't browse a really deep tree structure from Media Centre, or it just overflows those 8 digits really quickly! It's not helped if you have >10,000 items stored in MC either, but there's nothing I can do about that. I don't think UPnP has anything like that limitation though.
I've often thought that one of the best ways to get UPnP support into MC would be to get Twonky to interface with it. It currently interfaces with WinAmp (and I have a feeling support for one other application was recently added, but I might have imagined that bit!) or works in standalone mode. In any event, Twonky (which you can get from
www.twonkyvision.de) is widely reckoned to be the best way to serve UPnP AV at the moment. There's more information about it at
www.media-servers.com
Author
Topic: Making Media Center Stream to Dedicated Devices (Read 5849 times)