Thursday, 28 July

New Fabulous Toy

We received a nice new toy today - a Philips Streamium (god, that branding team deserve a prize huh?) SL300i. It's quite a faceless little box that sits between your TV and your network and allows you to stream movies (and music and pictures) to the TV. The TV interface is kind of a sub-TiVo or iPod attempt at navigating directories and lists of files. It's certainly not pretty but gets the job done I guess. Ideally I'd like to be able to hack it into something lovely. The server software for OSX is bloody rubbish though. However, after much looking around it works best with Elgato's Eyeconnect software... and by best i mean it works - every other UPnP (for it is she) server software was *really* poor.

Hopefully, VLC will get around to being embedded in a server in a future version, ideally offering transcoding so that unsupported media formats can be turned into whatever the box is happy with. Until lazyweb provides such an item it's all still a bit bleeding edge and definitely not ready for prime time in my opinion. But soon...