I've been trying to mix myself some martini media over the weekend, and while I experienced some success, it confirms that only the semi-technical adventurers will be able to make the concept of 'anytime, anyplace, anywhere' for their favourite media a reality some time soon.
Here were my ingredients for the martini; my home PC, my DVD collection, my PlayStation 3 and my PlayStation Portable (PSP).
The PSP is the anytime,anywere bit. It has built-in wi-fi, so as long as you have a good signal at an access point, you're onine. One of the features of the PS3 is 'remote play' a function that allows a PSP to control the PS3 remotely over the internet. This means that music, videos and some games stored on a PS3 can be played over the internet from far, far away.
However, the last thing you want to do is to have to duplicate your music and video collection of your PC and store on your PS3 hard disk. This is where the PS3's media server network capability comes in.
The PS3 can search for any DLNA compliant media servers that are within range of the wireless network it is on. In practice, this means a media server on your PC. Now, Windows Media Player comes with a built-in DLNA server which is easy to turn on just by selecting the Media Sharing option on the library.
In practice it's a bit shit. So using online advice I downloaded a free DLNA server called 'TV Versity'. This can easily generate it's library of audio/visual files from your PC just by pointing it at the folders. Within a minute or so, it had indexed my entire Itunes library. Itunes (surprise, surprise) is not a compatible media server, though you can use it to network between different Itunes clients.
I had already backed up several of my favourite DVDs, e.g. boxset of 'Six Feet Under' onto my PC. This is a torturous process using a combination of tools to rip the DVD and then transcode it. If the media industry finally accepted people want to back up video like they do their music, this could be much simpler.
The end result - I can access my entire home itunes library, anywhere in the world near an access point via my PSP and watch my digitised video stored on my PC on demand. Maybe not quite anywhere, and not reliably anytime, but getting there.
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