I am very interested in Audio, I really like the sound of a good old amplifier and his vinyle disc player with all the cracks making it "Authentic". But I am also a little bit geek and really enjoy using the latest technology release to make my multimedia world even more wonderful. I am going here to describe my intallation but also, and I think it is the most interessant for you who are visiting my website and already imagne to have it at home, the way I succeeded to make it happens.
I will not reveal any secret by telling that a good hardware is one of the first requirements to have a good multimedia installation. I will here describe all hardware I used and my feelings about it. It will be of course purely related to my experience and many other users may have different point of view.
No need to introduce this piece of hardware as you should heve been in an other world if you never heard about it. I really enjoy the games on it, but I will here describe a less known (but still popular) feature of the product : I am talking about the UPnP / DLNA client capability.
This feature can allow you to read your media on a compatible server (see the paragraph software), and so far, I really had great time with it, but it is sometimes quite painful to set-up. Not the PS3 itself, but more the related server. PS3 indeed do not support all the available media format and may refuse to read your favorite movie because it is not the good audio sampling rate or the good video codec.
So far, the best results I got are using Mediatomb server (see Software paragraph), running on my computer (see related paragraph).
For the PS3, as said already, the out of the box configuration will be enough. Of course, if it was taken out of the box a while ago, a firmware update may be necessary, actually, you just need to ensure that you have a firmware more recent than 1.80. But, having the latest one may help you, the support of DivX 3.x codec was indeed added in the firmware 2.60.
My PS3 is connected to the network through the WiFi connection.
The Denon AVR-4308 is a high-end amplifier which is quite expensive but it worth its cost. This wonderful amplifier have all of the latest technologies. It can of course play the bunch of CD player, DVD player, K7 player (if you still have) and all other Hi-Fi equipment that you will want to connect through traditionnal RCA connexion, but also the latest devices through HDMI 1.3 or S-Video, the connexion panel is quite rich and the configuration quite multiple. It also has a WiFi connexion which allows you to listen to internet radio or use a UPnP / DLNA audio server. The connexion seems quite fair, but I still got some freeze while listening some internet radio (maybe my internet connexion). The interface to navigate inside the different media of the UPnP server is also quite slow.
Like the PS3, there is not that much to configure on the Denon AVR-4308. The longest part is to configure the different input and set-up each of them. It is indeed possible to choose different options : video upscalling or not, sound output, equalizer... Except this, the basic give pretty satisfying results.
The video upscalling is quite good and fair results, but I got a small issue when using with my DVD player (Philips DVP-7040) and my flat panel TV (Sony KLV-52X300A), I have a serie of white dots in the top left corner when I activate the upscalling on the amplifier. I do not got these dots when the upscalling is done by the TV, but the image quality is not as good as with the amplifier...difficult choice...
The Freecom MusicPal does not have great acoustic performances, but I love it. Firstly, its look is quite nice, easy to integrate as simple, it looks sometimes a bit cheap, especially when it is playing with loud sound level, but its features make me happy with it.
I indeed search for a while before finding this product, I was looking for an internet radio to be used as wake-up clock. Most of the internet radio do not have the wake-up function, most of the wake-up clocks do not have the internet radio feature, and very few have both + WiFi. I had hesitation with the Philips WAK-3300 but according to other reviews, this last one have a night brightness a bit too high.
As said previously, I am very happy with this product and I can wake up in my appartment in China, listening to my favorite french radio station. Very nice !!
It is also possible to fall asleep while listening a very relaxing music to evacuate all the stress of the work. Very nice !!
It is also possible to fall asleep with this relaxing music and be waken up by a loudly hard-rock or anything strong enough to take you out of the night without setupping anything in between. Very nice !!
But here come the bad... The volume can not be different, so, it means, either you fall asleep with loudly music, either you wake up with low volume music... It would be great to have a function for the sleep timer which decrease slowly the volume till it reaches 0%... Freecom people, if you read me...
The Qnap TS-109 is a NAS with a bunch of functions which can be very good in a home network. It has a download station based on BitTorrent protocol with a web interface. It can also be used as a web server with a HTTP / PHP server and a MySQL database. I created an internal website to manage my film collection on it. I can then select my movie on it before inserting the DVD or Blu-Ray in the related device. The TS-109 also have a TwonkyMedia server ready out of the box. It can then serve the media to any compatible client.
The download station is quite good, everything depends of course of the seeds quality. I used to experiment some rapidity issues while having many parallel downloads and accessing files in the same time. The HTTP/PHP server is quite good as well. It is possible to use a DDNS service to access it from outside the local network.
Finally, the UPnP service through Twonkymedia is great for all audio files, and for both PS3 and MusicPal. For the video, I felt it a bit slow. Apart the fact that it does not allow the transcoding because of Twonkymedia does not have it, but also because the hardware is not powerful enough, I also experiment some issues while trying to do some fast forwrding.
Other functions such as Samba shares are also great and allow to create a good LAN.
Logitech Harmony 1000 is a universal remote control which can easily replace the bunch of remotes you have on the coffee table. It has a touch screen and the menus are configurable with the color of your choice. All buttons can be affected to any functions, including the hard buttons. Macros are possible to do one "Activity" such as "watch TV" and the remote will then send all the necessary commands to your devices : for instance, switch on the TV, switch on the satellite receiver, set up TV on satellite input.
The built quality is pretty good with an aluminium top giving a very high quality aspect. Rubber painting on the plastic parts also participate to this feeling. The touch screen is kind of slow and not responsive, the macro executions are long and we end up pointing the remote for 3-5 seconds to the devices (still better than getting 3 or 4 different remotes).
The programmation of the macros is also very easy with the tool they provide. Unfortunately, this tool does not work under Ubuntu (even through Wine). The usage of the remote is quite simple too and the "help" menu can correct any signal missed (for instance the satellite receiver did not start as the remote was not well oriented), but this back-up solution is not very nice (anyway, it is a back-up).
To summarize, this is a very good product but the slow and not responsive touch screen makes it not perfect.
As the Hardware can not do great things alone, it is needed to have the good software configuration to go with. Here, I'll go through some solutions which are based on Linux or Windows solution. As I do not own Mac, I won't detail any solution for the Apple models.
UPnP stands for Universal Plug'n Play. It is a set of computer protocols promulgated by the UPnP Forum. It is basically aimed to simplify the home network creation by allowing simple connexion
DLNA stands for Digital Living Network Alliance. It is a standard for the network based multimedia application.
Mediatomb is a UPnP server. It runs under Linux OS but not under Windows. All format can be used with this media server as it allows the transcoding by using some other software such as VLC, FFMpeg, MPlayer...
The trancoding function is very interessant when the client is not able to read all format, it is often the case with the PS3 and the proprietary format such as *.rmvb, *.mov...
With MediaTomb, a big part of the set-up is dedicated to the config file. As it is needed to call a third party software to do the transcoding, this one has to be intalled already. My configuration is based on an KUbuntu OS. The third party software I will use are VLC, FFMPEG and MPlayer.
This file is : /home/username/.mediatomb/config.xml, of course the username will be the actual one on your Ubuntu installation. As you can see, I call the mencoder, it will then have to be installed at the latest version. I also advice to have FFMpeg installed at the latest version. There is also a way to use VLC as encoder, see the un-activated one in the below config file.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<config version="1" xmlns="http://mediatomb.cc/config/1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://mediatomb.cc/config/1 http://mediatomb.cc/config/1.xsd">
<server>
<port>49152</port>
<ui enabled="yes">
<accounts enabled="no" session-timeout="30">
<account user="mediatomb" password="mediatomb"/>
</accounts>
</ui>
<name>Multimedia Server on (PC)</name>
<udn>uuid:4ee0c252-2780-44ce-8170-cf3549fe0186</udn>
<home>/home/vincent/.mediatomb</home>
<webroot>/usr/share/mediatomb/web</webroot>
<storage>
<sqlite3 enabled="yes">
<database-file>mediatomb.db</database-file>
</sqlite3>
<mysql enabled="no">
<host>localhost</host>
<username>mediatomb</username>
<database>mediatomb</database>
</mysql>
</storage>
<pc-directory upnp-hide="no"/>
<protocolInfo extend="yes"/>
</server>
<import hidden-files="no">
<scripting script-charset="UTF-8">
<common-script>/usr/share/mediatomb/js/common.js</common-script>
<playlist-script>/usr/share/mediatomb/js/playlists.js</playlist-script>
<virtual-layout type="builtin">
<import-script>/usr/share/mediatomb/js/import.js</import-script>
</virtual-layout>
</scripting>
<mappings>
<extension-mimetype ignore-unknown="yes">
<map from="mp3" to="audio/mpeg"/>
<map from="ogg" to="application/ogg"/>
<map from="wma" to="audio/x-ms-wma"/>
<map from="wax" to="audio/x-ms-wax"/>
<map from="m3u" to="audio/x-mpegurl"/>
<map from="pls" to="audio/x-scpls"/>
<map from="asf" to="video/x-ms-asf"/>
<map from="asx" to="video/x-ms-asf"/>
<map from="wmv" to="video/x-ms-wmv"/>
<map from="wvx" to="video/x-ms-wvx"/>
<map from="wm" to="video/x-ms-wm"/>
<map from="wmx" to="video/x-ms-wmx"/>
<map from="flv" to="video/x-flv"/>
<map from="mkv" to="video/x-matroska"/>
<map from="mp4" to="video/mp4"/>
<map from="rmvb" to="application/vnd.rn-realmedia"/>
<map from="avi" to="video/divx"/>
</extension-mimetype>
<mimetype-upnpclass>
<map from="audio/*" to="object.item.audioItem.musicTrack"/>
<map from="video/*" to="object.item.videoItem"/>
<map from="application/vnd.rn-realmedia" to="object.item.videoItem"/>
<map from="application/vnd" to="object.item.videoItem"/>
<map from="image/*" to="object.item.imageItem"/>
</mimetype-upnpclass>
<mimetype-contenttype>
<treat mimetype="audio/mpeg" as="mp3"/>
<treat mimetype="application/ogg" as="ogg"/>
<treat mimetype="audio/x-flac" as="flac"/>
<treat mimetype="image/jpeg" as="jpg"/>
<treat mimetype="audio/x-mpegurl" as="playlist"/>
<treat mimetype="audio/x-scpls" as="playlist"/>
<treat mimetype="audio/x-wav" as="pcm"/>
<treat mimetype="audio/L16" as="pcm"/>
<treat mimetype="video/x-msvideo" as="avi"/>
<treat mimetype="video/divx" as="avi"/>
<treat mimetype="video/mp4" as="mp4"/>
<treat mimetype="video/x-matroska" as="mkv"/>
<treat mimetype="application/vnd.rn-realmedia" as="rmvb"/>
<treat mimetype="application/vnd" as="rmvb"/>
</mimetype-contenttype>
</mappings>
</import>
<transcoding enabled="yes">
<mimetype-profile-mappings>
<transcode mimetype="video/x-flv" using="mencoder"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/x-ms-asf" using="mencoder"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/avi" using="mencoder"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/divx" using="mencoder"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/mp4" using="mencoder"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/x-msvideo" using="mencoder"/>
<transcode mimetype="application/ogg" using="mencoder"/>
<transcode mimetype="application/vnd.rn-realmedia" using="mencoder"/>
<transcode mimetype="application/vnd" using="mencoder"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/x-matroska" using="mencoder"/>
<transcode mimetype="application/ogg" using="oggflac2raw"/>
<transcode mimetype="audio/x-flac" using="oggflac2raw"/>
</mimetype-profile-mappings>
<profiles>
<profile name="mencoder" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<accept-url>yes</accept-url>
<accept-ogg-theora>yes</accept-ogg-theora>
<agent command="mencoder" arguments="%in -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:keyint=1:vbitrate=60000:vrc_maxrate=6000:vrc_buf_size=1835 -mpegopts muxrate=12000 -vf harddup -ofps 25 -o %out"/>
<buffer size="14400000" chunk-size="524288" fill-size="120000"/>
</profile>
<profile name="vlcmpeg" enabled="no" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<accept-url>yes</accept-url>
<first-resource>yes</first-resource>
<accept-ogg-theora>yes</accept-ogg-theora>
<agent command="vlc" arguments="-I dummy %in --sout #transcode{venc=ffmpeg,vcodec=mp2v,vb=4096,fps=25,aenc=ffmpeg,acodec=mpga,ab=192, samplerate=48000,channels=2}: standard{access=file,mux=ps,dst=%out} vlc:quit"/>
<buffer size="14400000" chunk-size="512000" fill-size="120000"/>
</profile>
</profiles>
</transcoding>
</config>
TVersity is a UPnP media server which runs under Windows. It allows the live transcoding natively but is limited to some format. I got some quite good result and I advice it to anybody who is running Windows only. For me, Tversity story ended when my girlfriend came home with a bunch of *.rmvb files I could not run. In the same time, I discovered that Linux made a lot of improvement and I then tried Ubuntu, before totally switching to it. I then go to MediaTomb.
Nero Home Multimedia Server is running under Windows. It allows the transcoding but is quite limited in the number of format. It is also not configurable at all and I did not get results good enough to continue with it. With some UPnP client which accept a lot of format, this solution can be interessant, but not with a PS3... Moreover, Nero is not free...
WMP 11 is one of the simplest to implement as it is only some (actually one) functions to activate and it is ready. But unfortunately, it does not allow the transcoding...I then used it only a little, just to see what it was capable of. Once more, if the UPnP client accept various format, this can be a good solution to have a look on.
TwonkyMedia is a pretty good server, very stable and with a web interface to manage the library. The tree can also be configured in order not to have to go in a very long directory succession to find your file. Unfortunately, it has 2 major flaw : it is not free and it does not allow the transcoding. I use it anyway as it was installed by default on my NAS and for the MP3, it helps me to keep the computer switched off (and save some power).
John, 2010-11-04 14:54:11
Thanks for the config file for Mediathomb : it's really help me !
Michel, 2010-10-25 19:45:12
Très pratique ce tutoriel ! Merci :-)
Psy Ponce, 2009-12-29 22:54:19
Very kewl! Thanks for the info.