If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you already know I’m a huge fan of digital content and digital distribution. It should come as no great surprise then, that I also dabble in the art of Home Media Networking, to facilitate the distribution of digital content around the home. It’s a bit of a passion, really, as I’ve envisioned this stuff years before the term “HTPC” was invented (Home Theatre Personal Computer), and have had more brainstorming and experience conversations with friends over the years than I can count.
Although digital content has been around for years, the method of distributing that stuff around your house is still in gestation. DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) is a seed struggling to sprout in the desert sea of the Sahara. Even with DLNA, we still have proprietary rogues Apple and Microsoft (among others) going it alone with iTunes via DAAP and Windows Media Player via WMC. DLNA is more of a compliance statement than a protocol, which is likely part of the reason many DLNA-compliant products do not behave predictably with one another. WMC apparently fits within the DLNA spec and qualifies, but iTunes doesn’t. On top of this, some products are only DLNA servers, and others are only DLNA players, and all too often the vendors don’t specify which role their products occupy. The DLNA seed was desperately needed, but the current state of confusion and mis-information shows just how much farther it has to go/grow before it can be considered a standard/sapling.
I’ve been playing with various Home Media Networking (HMN) setups over a few years now, and have run into all manner interoperability and functionality issues, pros, and cons – but I’ve never found that “perfect” setup. I’ve questioned whether such a setup was feasible, and have even started to question if I knew what my own definition of what “perfect” was. So I set about on a bit of a quest. I’ve started documenting my requirements, and my experiences of various setups and products. Although there’s bloggable story to it, I wanted to keep a living document on my wiki instead, which I can expand on and refer to down the road, when I inevitably forget why I chose not to use Product X, and to help reach for that “perfect setup” utopia. Please check it out, and feel free to leave comments there. I will update it from time to time, so it might be worth adding to your RSS feed if you’re interested. Let me know if you want to add stuff to the wiki page, and I’ll be happy to give you access… the more input I have on this challenge, the better.
