Streaming Media to the Home Theater

Table of Contents

1) Introduction
2) The Hardware You Will Need
3) The (Free) Software You Will Need
4) Web Media and Netflix
5) How It works
5) My Setup

Introduction

If you're like most people you probably have a bunch of folders on your pc that are filled with pictures, movies and music. Have you ever wanted to stream them to your tv without hooking any devices up to it? Or maybe you wanted to listen to any song in your music collection without dragging out your iPod? Better yet, maybe you wanted to put all of your movies (dvd, blu rays, etc) in a single place so that you can watch them on demand.

If so, this guide is for you.

This is all fairly easy to do and it is completely free if you have the hardware. If you have any questions please feel free to use the Comments button below.

The Hardware

None of this happens without hardware, right? The great thing is that you probably already have most of the following. Please note one thing up front - you need to have your device on your home network for any of this to work.

• A Television (not necessary for streaming audio).
• A computer. You wouldn't be reading this if you didn't have one.
• A network with a router. You probably have this - it is the device with lots of lights next to it that sit next to your cable modem.
• A media streaming device. What is that? Lots of things that you probably did not realize could stream media:
    PS3
    XBox 360
  

    Wii
  

    DirecTV Receiver. You are surprised? Check the back of your receiver and you will see
    Several other media devices (several under $100). Popcourn Hour and Roku are two popular brand names.
  

The Software

If you want to be able to stream pictures, home movies, etc to your home theater you will need to install any one of the FREE software packages mentioned below. The setup is generally very straight-forward and there are lots of install guides out there for the ones that are a little trickier.

- Playstion Media Server. Only use this if you are looking to stream blu-ray and other high-end video formats. Don't let the name fool you - it can stream any format to any kind of device. For example, you can stream HD-DVD formats to a ps3 and blu ray to an XBox. The software translates the video on the fly so that your device can understand it.
- TVersity. If you are looking for an all-in-one I would install this app. The setup is fairly-straight forward. This will also allow you to access your stuff from away from home on your Blackberry, iPhone, Android, etc.
- Serviio. I am currently using this to serve my audio to my various devices but will also serve video, pictures, web media, etc.
- Orb. You can stream this to anything on your home network as well as external devices. I no longer use this as it is buggy but some people like it.

Let me stress one thing. At no point during any of this do you need to do anything more than start the software that you installed on your pc. Everything is done on demand by use of your remote control. More on that in "How It All Works". I usually set the software to load when windows loads so that it is running all of the time in the background.

Web Media and Netflix

Some devices do not require the need for you to have a pc running. For example, devices like the PS3, and the Wii allow you to browse the web directly. You can use their built-in browsers to go to youtube or any other site that serves media.

Do you have a Netflix account? If so, you need only a compatible device (including the PS3, Wii and XBox) to stream directly from the Netflix servers. That's right - no need for a pc or software to be running in your house. At time of this writing you can watch as many movies as you want on demand directly from Netflix. The only drawback is that you can't steam HD-quality movies because of the limited bandwidth of the Internet. If you have a PS3 you can stream blu ray movies directly from Sony for about $4.99 per movie. This is possible because the video is downloaded directly onto your PS3 for 24 hours.

How It All Works

At this point you may be wondering how all of this ties together. How in the world will my PS3 be able to show my photos on tv?

When you install one of the software packages mentioned above on your pc, your pc instantly becomes what is known as a Universal Plug and Play server (UPNP). In simple terms, this means that your computer is constantly raising its hand on your home network as if to say "hey, I've got stuff that I'm ready to serve to you". If you were then to go over to turn on your media player (PS3, XBox, etc) your pc would show up in the media server area (note: in the PS3 you have to turn this on in the PS3 setup. I would assume the same would be true of the XBox).

Once you click on the media server you should be presented with a menu that is specific to the kind of media streaming software that you installed on your pc. For example, if you installed TVersity the first menu that you will see is "Audio, Video, Photos...". At that point you drill down into the media that you are looking to stream. Just navigate to the media that you want and click on it to start playing. Some software packages give you the options to do cool stuff like playing some of your mp3's while sorting through your photos.

There are some other cool features that exist in some of the various software packages. For example, TVersity lets you enter your account names from various sites like Hulu, Youtube, etc. This means that all of the shows, videos, etc that you marked as favorites on these sites will instantly show up on your menu and you can play them directly from the site. For example, lets say that you marked "Family Guy" as a favorite on Hulu and entered your Hulu account information into TVersity. When you fired up your media streamer you could navigate to the "Web Media" area and all of the Family Guy episodes would show up there. If you went to Hulu and added a new favorite to your account the change is reflected on your media server automatically. Have a favorite podcast? Simply enter the RSS feed into Tversity and the software will automatically create (and update!) links in the menu.

My Setup

We first and foremost use all of this to listen to our music collection. The last time I checked we have about 70,000 mp3's arranged by album on our pc. That's right - I can play any one of them from any number of devices around the house or even from our phones. I can't tell you how cool it is to be able to be sitting out by the pool and put on a new cd. We also have some other free software that lets us access our online XM account in the same manner (all of the channels show up on the audio streamer). As if that wasn't enough, we have some other software that records our favorite shows and puts them onto the pc automatically.

We also have a movie download service that I can not mention here. We subscribe to both HBO and Starz but it is still nice to get the same movies in blu ray format. When I obtain one of these movies I drop it right onto my pc. I then fire up my PS3 and it instantly see Playstation Media Server running on my pc. I can then stream the movie to my PS3 in pure blu ray goodness. That's right - the audio and video are preserved in the streaming. There is a bit of a caveat with this one - if you want to use the ultra-high quality you will need a pretty powerful setup. You can see mine here - I am running a Dell server on a gigabit network. There are times when I am streaming 400mps through my network. You can still do this with a lesser setup - just scale back the settings in the software a bit and it will work fine and look great.

If you would like to see my audio and video setup you can see it here.

Here is an example of how the PS3 shows all of my movies on the screen. I need only to click on a movie to start playback. What could be better than being able to watch Snatch any time you'd like without getting up off of the couch?

Here is an example of streaming a blu ray movie to my PS3 using Playstation Media server. In this case the movie is Start Trek. In this shot you can see the streaming statistics on the edge of the screens. Do not be alarmed! I did this only to show that it is possible. You simply hit the "Info" button to show/hide these statistics. You may have also noticed that the audio shows "2 Channel". This is done by design - in this case it means that the PS3 has passed the audio directly to your home theater for processing. In my setup I do not want the PS3 messing with the audio in any way.