Access music, films and photos at home or away

When we last looked at home media networks, in 2007, they were the preserve of the enthusiast, with only a few ‘mainstream’ pieces of equipment available to help you share your digital media around the home.

Now though, there’s a steady stream of devices to help you play back or share your media, ­ from high-capacity network-attached storage (Nas) drives with built-in streaming servers, to audio systems that can browse your network for media files to play and even televisions with built-in Ethernet ports.

With the BBC’s iPlayer set to be available on Freesat set-top boxes later this year, and new standards for Freeview boxes including Ethernet ports as well, together with mobile phones that are capable of live video streaming, there is plenty of potential for setting up a home network that will let you access anything, on any device.

Unfortunately, as is often the way with technology, there’s also a bewildering soup of acronyms and plenty of scope for incompatibilities. So, in this feature we’ll explain what’s possible with the latest equipment, and what you need to worry about when you’re trying to set everything up to access your media, anywhere.

Picture this
Imagine a typical living room, with a digital TV recorder that allows you to watch one channel and record another, or even record two at the same time. A media streamer lets you play back downloaded videos or shared music from a Nas drive.

But imagine the TV recorder links to the network ­ suddenly you can schedule recordings via the web or text message. PCs in other rooms can play back the recordings that are on its hard drive, using free software, as well as those that are on your Nas. More free software lets you share your iTunes library of music from your laptop, so every computer can access all your media files.

Moreover, a script on one of the PCs can watch for files moved to a particular folder on the TV recorder, and automatically convert them for your iPod or Playstation Portable (PSP), or just copy them to the Nas, freeing up space on the recorder.

Plug in a network TV tuner and any PC can watch live, even if it’s in a basement miles from the aerial. You can even sit the other side of the world and see exactly what’s on your TV screen.

Not all of this can be done free of charge ­ hardware’s never going to be free. But much of the essential software is ­ so it may be a lot cheaper than you imagine to take your network to the next level.