Hand on: Wireless streaming made easy

As a concept, multimedia streaming gets written about a lot, but theory is one thing, doing it yourself quite another, especially if you want to stream data to a TV or hifi rather than another desktop PC.

So here's an idea of what’s involved, using hardware you can buy and install to stream music, photos and video to a home-entertainment system.

What’s in a stream?
The idea behind streaming is to send a steady flow or ‘stream’ of data to an end-user application or device at such a rate that it can play the music and/or display the video signals involved in real time without any perceived pauses or gaps.

To do this, some kind of streaming server is typically required to compress, encapsulate and transmit the data, plus there needs to be a compatible receiving device or application at the other end to decode, buffer and display it.

The sending server and receiving device can be some distance apart, connected by a wired or wireless Lan or even the internet.

However, for this article I’m sticking to wireless, which means you can have the server more or less where you want without having to run any extra cable around the house.

And why would you want to do this, you might ask? Well, streaming allows music and movies to be sent to a PC or home-entertainment system on demand, so you can listen to and watch what you want, when you want.

If you configure your own streaming server, you can also store all your digital photos, mp3 tracks, recorded (or even live) TV and movies on a shared PC, making it easier to find what you want, while at the same time doing away with all those boxes.

All of which sounds pretty good and, if you look hard enough, it’s not that difficult to find a range of multimedia streaming solutions.

However, for this walkthrough, I’ve used a D-Link Medialounge DSM-320RD wireless media player. Not because it’s the best there is, although it does seem to work well. And not because it’s the cheapest solution either, with plenty of software-based servers able to stream data to a multimedia PC.

I've chosen this one because if you want to stream data directly to your home-entertainment system, it’s a neat and affordable solution that comes with just about everything required to get started.

Plugging it together
Available online for about £180, the D-Link DSM-320RD looks like a domestic DVD player with the usual pop-out drawer to take disks at the front, and an impressive row of connectors at the rear for attachment to your home-entertainment system.

This model also has slots to take a variety of memory cards, and both wired and wireless networking interfaces.

Hardware installation is a matter of connecting the DSM-320RD to your TV/audio system, just like a DVD or video player. I opted for Scart because the TV involved didn’t support anything else, although if you want higher quality, leads for progressive scan video output are provided, plus connectors for both coax and optical digital audio.

You then either connect the player to a wired network using the 10/100Mbits/sec UTP interface or, as I did, using the built-in 802.11g adapter to stream data to the unit wirelessly.

Configuring the hardware
Before that can happen you have to configure the wireless interface. There are two ways of going about this, the first of which is to key in the parameters directly, using a TV-like remote control.

Turn on the DSM-320RD and it runs a built-in setup wizard from which you can give the device a custom name and choose the network interface you want to use.

You can also scan for available wireless networks or manually specify the SSID (the network name). You then tell the player whether to use ad-hoc or infrastructure networking, the type of security to apply (you will have encryption turned on, won’t you?) and the keys required.

The IP address can also be specified or DHCP assignment selected, all using the remote control.

An on-screen keyboard helps, but it can still be a bit fiddly so the second option is to use Microsoft’s Windows Connect Now technology to configure the interface.