November 23, 2004
Setting up the streamium SL300i
Setup of the Streamium SL300i is fairly straight forward and is pretty much the same across the product line. The user's guide is well thought out and illustrated with diagrams showing various AV and network configurations. We will just do a brief overview here.
Connecting your sl300i
Lets assume right off that you have some kind of network either wired or wireless and a broadband Internet connection
Choose the video connection option you will use, your choices are limited to composite av type and svideo. The sl300i does not support component video, other models in the family do. If your monitor or av receiver has Svideo use that, you will get higher quality video.
Connect the audio out to the TV or receiver. A nice touch is a second set of audio out connectors (Audio Out 2) for connection to a separate stereo system.
Connect the AC adaptor, this is rather bulky and brick shaped, but has a standard three prong plug on the US model, this is better than the one piece molded design of some adaptors that make them difficult to fit in common power strips.
Next decide how you will connect the device to your network.
The Sl300i has both wireless G and a standard Ethernet port. You don’t really appreciate this unless you’ve also had experience with devices that bundle these separately i.e. Tivo SA 2 set top boxes.
If you have a spare Ethernet port on your hub or switch you will get best results using a standard cat5 or cat6 wired connection. Direct crossover is possible but we wouldn’t recommend that for use with media adaptors of any kind. A router is pretty much a necessity.
The stremium found the network quickly after connecting . A red led indicates the unit is in standby mode, clicking the button changes the led to green, indicating the device is available.
If you decide to use the wireless connection and have a wireless Access Point, setup is relatively painless, A wizard walks you through setting up your connection, select your network ssid from the selection list. Encryption key setup is about the same as any of these devices.
64-bit: 5 characters ASCII, or 10 characters HEX, or
128 bit: 13 characters ASCII, or 26 characters HEX
The ability to use both Hex and AscII is nice, some other vendors only offer one or the other. (Tip. if you can’t remember your code, and your pc has the opposite what you need you can search google for freeware hex to Dec calculators).
The streamium also support AD-HOC mode, so you can connect directly to a wireless laptop, on network setup select Phillips as the ssid name.
Once configured the device should easily find your network.
The streamium will now look for any firmware updates, which it will download and install. You can choose to defer any installation or auto update, we would recommend not using any auto update options with any of these media adaptor devices. Sometimes the firmware is released before proper QA is done, resulting in functionality that used to work no longer working. I will add that Philips is much better at QA than other providers, but still it is a good precaution.
Now if you haven’t done so already install the Philips media manager program or other server. The Philips connected Planet site requires you to register using the streamium. This is not apparent at first and we spent time searching the website for how to register.
Press the Internet button on the remote, after a short time (which will seem like forever) the streamium will present a screen requesting an email address and password for registration. You can also setup additional registrations if more than one person uses the device. The website than allows for different profiles for each user, something not that useful yet but may be as more features are added. Once connected to your broadband connection a selection list appears, the initial offering is some games, movies from ifilms (short films that are really hilarious), and movie trailers from yahoo. And several music sites, including music ondemand from AOL. (Pretty cool).
You now have an account you can use to modify your option on the Phillips connected planet site.
Pressing pc-link will bring up the media server selection list, what’s displayed is dependent on the server you have chosen to use.
Next Video/Audio performace ….
Posted by Cassandra at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2004
Looking at the Philips Streamium
The UPS person just dropped off a new toy. The Philips SL300i media adaptor. This box is more commonly known in Europe than the US. You can’t just walk into a CompUSA or Circuit City and buy it, but you can order it directly from Philips or Amazon.com. The price is somewhat high between 250 to 299.00. But this box may meet the needs of many users.
The official specs are pretty impressive, although as we will see vary greatly by the quality of your network, your pc and the media server you are using.
Supported multimedia formats (codecs)
Audio MP3,MP3pro,Real Audio, PCM,WAV
Video MPEG1,MPEG2, MPEG4,
playback DivX 4.0/5.03
Picture JPEG,BMP, GIF
Playlist M3U, ID3
Upgradability for new codecs...
Network Features
Interoperability Universal Plug & Play (UPnP)
Protocol TCP/IP
Wired
Ethernet RJ45 jack
Wireless
802.11g
Audio & Video ConnectorsVideo output 1x SCART (RGB, CVBS)
Audio output 1x L/R Line out (cinch red / white)
Unlike several other upnp devices, the streamium is fully Intel NMPR
complient and works with most of the Intel UPNP demonstration and testing tools available for download off their site.
The Av controller and the Av webserver will not only find the streamium but unlike devices like the Dlink DSM320 will correctly display a list of videos or music files to select from. The send to media render action however does not work, apparently Philips does not support the SetNextAVTransportUR action method.
All the streamium devices work with several different servers, over the next few days we will go into specifics of each of the ones we tested with. Video format and quality vary widely by server. The sl300i and presumably other members of the streamium family play the formats internally but at least one server the Nero media home does transcoding on the pc side. The included Philips media manager is a slick Java application but is a bit hard on resources and we found it to have trouble playing some video files. Surprisely the low priced (about 10.00) Twonkyvision server proved to be the most robust.
Servers Which Work to an extent.
Philips media manager
Dlink Server
Twonkeyvision
Nero Media Home
EZ stream server
Intel AV server
Some of these servers all only available if you have other media adaptors.
Nero mediahome is fully supported by the Streamium and the Intel Av Controller.
The Twonkyvision server is a small dos console application.
Next : Setting up the SL300i....
Posted by Cassandra at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)