Mediastreamer - New application from Nokia
 

I found the following information from the tableteer-Enhance page.

A stream of music from your PC to your 770

Think of the music you have stored on your home PC. Now you can easily access it with your Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.

Media Streamer application enables listening to the music stored on your PC, in practically which ever corner of your home you like. Switch on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and choose your favorite songs shown on your device from the PC to play them.

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is enabled with UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) technology, which makes possible a new way to have your home devices working seamlessly together.

Give it a try!
We will show you in 3 easy steps how to listen to the music from PC with your Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.

NOTE! The devices must be connected to the same WLAN access point.

For this set-up you need Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, a PC and a functioning WLAN access point.

STEP 1
Download and install a mediaserver to your PC. Mediaserver is software for sharing content from your PC. You can do it e.g. with software called SimpleCenter. Download SimpleCenter to your PC from www.simplecenter.com/nokia

STEP 2
You need software in your Nokia 770 Internet Tablet to browse and play the shared content from PC. Install Media Streamer to your Nokia 770 Internet Tablet for this purpose. Please follow these instructions to install the application:

1. Tap and select Tools > Application manager

2. Tap Install new applications

3. Find Media Streamer from the list and tap it twice to install it. If you don’t see Media Streamer on the list, please refresh the list from Application manager > Tools > Refresh list of packages

STEP 3
Open Media Streamer in your Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. Browse and choose the music you want to listen and just play it.


Enjoy.
Syam

I saw that the other day too and installed it. It has a pretty cool UI but I have no clue what media it is supposed to stream from where :]

This is interesting. I definately like the UI [the horizontal sliding rocks, very nice idea]. I guess we'll have to wait until Nokia makes an official announcement.

I wish the normal media player was like this. It would make it way easier to pick out local media files and playlists with your fingers.

Perhaps this is a hint of things to come.

"Media Streamer is a UPnP AV control point and player application."

Man, I wish I would have come up with this UI a while back. This is very slick.

Where did you guys find this? Don't see it on Maemo...

It shows up in the Application Manager. I don't know the exact repository it's from but here's a link to point you in the right direction.

Repository information http://repository.maemo.org/contrib/...armel/Packages

Update
 

Updated the first post with new information from the tableteer webpage.

I've got a quick preview and some screen shots here for those who want to see how it looks.

Just downloaded the Media Streamer application for the Nokia 770 and as a quick test have it playing my served Audio from the Twonky and/or TVersity UPnP Media servers running on my PC. This means that any UPnP server running on a Mac, Linux, Windows PC's should work with the Media Streamer on the Nokia 770. (No need to purchase SlimCenter etc)

There are UPnP Servers for Linux such as GMediaServer

Note: I have not tried Linux Versions of UPnP Media Servers so cannot comment on best of breed etc.

The Nokia 770 Media Streamer application is a very good Find :)

---edit---Been streaming music using the Twonky Media Server, whilst the Media streamer can see Tversity as a UPnP Server I am having problems viewing the share ATM.

Note, I do not see functionality within the current Media streamer to advise it to play the music not on my Nokia 770 but on for example my SL300i UPnP Media player. (So where is the controller element?)

The current version can see my Pictures and Video folders etc shared by the UPnP Server, but whilst named items can be selected and added to playlist, Pictures and Videos do not invoke the required result. (Player tries to play them, does not crash or anything, just nothing happens...)

These are my early evaluation results...

Ah, you're right. GMediaServer does work. I just tested it. It's having some trouble with a few of my mp3s though. I also noticed the inability to view pictures and video with the player. Guess that's something to possibly be fixed in the next version. It's very good so far. Thanks for this Nokia!

Here are a couple of my screen grabs for the Internet Tablet Forum :)

http://static.flickr.com/91/232563217_c0e3f3b500.jpg
http://static.flickr.com/96/232563219_8fe56e86c6.jpg

To keep within My Fliker terms of service for providing my pictures in the forum post? http://www.flickr.com/photos/83537107@N00

There's a UPnP server for the MAC called "Connect360" -- actually targeted to stream iTunes and iPhotos to the XBOX. Tried it but it didn't discover the Nokia 770's Media Streamer player... maybe because of my "briged" WiFi / Ethernet network... though the broadcast packets from the the Media Streamer were visible to the MAC.

Has anyone tried Twonkyvision on the Mac?

-- Denis

Take back what I said earlier about UPnP Control element. :o

I have realised that the Media Streamer is indeed a very capable UPnP Controller as well as a UPnP Player. When my streamium device SL300i device is powered up and available on the network, the interface of the Media streamer allows me to select either the Nokia 770 or the SL300i for playback of the items, I am selecting for Playback via the Nokia 700 & Media Streamer.

I have it working right now and it's bloody magic, this is one of the reasons why I purchased the Nokia 770. The ability to control the playback of music on my Hi-Fi from a collection held on a hard disk on my network! :)

Here is an image of how to switch/select the UPnP Playback device on the Nokia 770

http://static.flickr.com/91/232680545_b4563f3c2b.jpg

The Media Streamers interface is clean, basic and easy for a beginner to understand as there are currently NO fancy advanced settings in the GUI.

Well done Nokia, from a happy Nokia 770 owner.

PS: is this preparation for Media Streamers release into the Maemo Garage and user input to future developments? https://garage.maemo.org/projects/mediastreamer/

I do hope so ;)

Ahh, RemoteUser, where are you now, eh?

Would this Media Streamer work with TVersity?

http://www.tversity.com/

I wasn't able to get it working on my system, but that could be due to a number of factors: firewall, antivirus, etc.

Karel, ==DC== and others. I think that something about the way TVersity is currently talking on the network (Via a profile setting in the TVersity GUI) is why Media streamer cannot see and operate with TVersity well. I have already posted a thread in the Tversity forum, so hopefully Ronen will advise us how to get TVersity and Media streamer co-operating.

Here is the Thread

In the meantime why don't you take a look at Twonky, there is a thirty day version available Here

BTW I have also blogged about how to use Media Streamer in my Blog

Really plug & Play application
 

It just worked without any settings, real plug & play application.

Interestingly, you can control the Server as well.
I was able to play the music on my PC using this application.

But I could not play any video or view pictures.
Anybody else tried these?

Thanks.

Thanks. In any case, I'm going to wait until Media Streamer does video. Audio is not a priority to me.

Okay, here's what I have so far: GMediaStreamer works in Ubuntu, but a few mp3s don't play and there's no option to control the server like SimpleCenter does. TVersity doesn't work at all [just sits there]. Still haven't tried Twonky yet, but will be testing that later today. At the moment, SimpeCenter works best in Windows so far, and GMediaStreamer works well enough for Ubuntu. There's another Linux UPnP server app that I may give a try later as well. I sure hope MikeL is right about the release of Media Streamer into Maemo Garage. It would be great to see other applications using a similar UI.

Update: Twonky works and has a simple interface, but as of this version, there's no option to control the server. The other Linux UPnP server app turned out not to be a server app but a control point & player instead. So I'm sticking with the SimpleCenter for now. I hope TVersity and others get support for this app soon.

I want Video and I hope that any update to Media Streamer improves stability of video playback across the all claimed supported Nokia 770 formats when streaming on the network rather than playing locally on the device.

Also: Just to let everyone know that although Media Streamer does not currently playback Video and Pictures on the Nokia 770; I have been successfully using the Media Streamer as a controller to play Videos and Pictures on my TV using my SL300i. (via Twonky)

So in a nutshell, Media Streamer as a UPnP controller provides the majority of the Key Cidero Controller functionality on a small convenient tablet device. I can say that it appears to be very robust on my network, where even if the Wi-Fi connection drops on the network Media streamer seems to carry on elegantly without locking up the Nokia 770. I can therefore re-establish connection and carry on from where I left off in the Media renderer etc. :cool:

What exactly do you mean when you say NO option to control the server from the Nokia 770? i.e. what do you want to control on the server, the shared folders etc. (Like with the Tversity GUI, which does not run on the Nokia 770 due to Linux Flash version and memory availability issues I think?)

I have SimpleCenter installed but because I am over the 30 days, I cannot enable the UPnP server option without paying for the premium product? so cannot see what a new SimpleCenter user can see. I do not wish to pay on principle as SimpleCenter is a re-badged heavily updated version of the software that came with my Philips SL300i device, whose users provided good use feedback in the Philips forums to be effectively sold down the river when they lost interest :mad:

My hearts with the TVersity team as their product is developing in a really interesting way; providing clever AV Transcoding, Internet to local Network, RSS Feed functionality and features you will not find in any other Media Server ATM.

no luck with ushare
 

I have't been able to get the nokia to see a ushare pnp server on Fedora Core 5. It just doesn't see anything.

Update: I compiled gmediastreamer and it works with that.

Did you have to download and install the upnpsdk rpm or did libupnp in Fedora Extras work for you? In the configure step, it is stopping saying that I have no upnp installed when I just installed libupnp.

You need libupnp-devel installed. It worked fine after that.

I should add that gmediastreamer didn't like many of my ogg files even though I know they work fine. There didn't seem to be any consistent reason why it didn't like some of them that I could find but I didn't look very hard.

It's too bad I couldn't get ushare to work. It seemed more mature.

That worked like a charm ... thanks! MediaStreamer is a fairly nice app for Nokia to be hiding under a rock ... and *just* as I was typing that, it crashed and rebooted my 770 :]

Gmediaserver is skipping several of my oggs *and* mp3s too. I suspect it might be due to bad tags or at least tags that the library it uses isn't expecting. There is some verbage on the gmediaserver website about using different id3 tag libraries.

It also takes a *long* time for the contents of a subdirectory to show and the songs never seem to play quite to the end. May need to mess with the profile options.

What I meant was that there was no option to switch [the drop box] to play media server side in Twonky. Apparently I'm incorrect in that statement as you state you were able to use Media Streamer as a controller. Maybe something wrong with my settings, I'll check it out.

I don't mean to sway anyone one way or the other when choosing which software they use to act as a their media server, just trying to hammer out a rough comparison of the features of the ones I know about. From what I understand both SimpleCenter and Twonky have 30-day trials while TVersity is free from the start.

I also believe the TVersity team will get their product working with the Media Streamer really soon. I would rather use their solution in Windows than the others, but in the mean time [or 30 days in this case] I'll be using SimpleCenter and Twonky as alternatives.

==DC==

Regarding Media Server options I was not trying to sway anyone either and apologise if I came over that way as it was not my intention at all. Yes trying the various products for the trial period is a great way to understand the features as indeed I have done in the past.

It's really great that individuals are also making progress utilising a Linux UPnP Server as it highlights the benefits of a UPnP Media serving solution across and between multiple "personal choice" playback device platforms. (Win, Mac, Linux)

So from a current personal perspective...

Twonky is still my first choice for music, with TVersity as my current and long term AV media serving solution. Cidero for UPnP Control on PC's and now Media Streamer for control and playback on my Nokia 770.

Twonky is a very capable UPnP server. Good choice. I've actually been working with GMediaStreamer in Ubuntu a little more and found the solution to getting all my mp3s to show up in Media Streamer for the 770. I use the following command line option:

$ gmediaserver --disable-id3 -ieth1 -v4 ./<path>

Before I just used:

$ gmediaserver -ieth1 -v4 ./<path>

Just thought I'd throw that out there for anyone who might have trouble using GMediaStreamer in the future.

Seems the server is down that is hosting the file.... any alternative links?

What server? What file? Remember, the devil is in the details...

I sent an email to "Visa" of Nokia, providing a little feed back on Media Streamer and my/our excitement on its release for the Nokia 770. The following is Visa's Reply
So it seems that depending on user interest, Beta's of the software could be released in Maemo garage prior to formal and full release next year.

PS I found Visa's email address in Maemo garage, I for one would love to have increased input and provide feeddback for/on the final release, prior to release.

dreaming of video streaming
 

any , how early version as it might be- input for video streaming from Nokia is welcome! Ready to test and give feedback

Hey, Nokia! I'm interested! Gimme, gimme, gimme!

I did more work with FC5 and got GMediaStreamer working well. I had limited time yesterday and didn't realize that it doesn't serve oggs by default, hence the giant hole in my collection. Today, I set it up correctly only to realize that ogg is still not supported on the Nokia side. Unfortunately most of my music is in ogg.

It seems like such a glaring oversight to not have native ogg support on the 770 yet.

Has anyone gotten a mac solution running? I can't seem to get Twonky nor Connect360 to work. I also downloaded Allegro and it doesn't seem to work either.

Having followed the same discussion on the P910 platform, the general consensus there (of course, after weeks and weeks of online debate) was that the ogg-format is more demanding on processor cycles and could have as much as a 10% decrease in battery life, compared to MP3.

Who knows, Nokia might have thought of that. Stranger things have happened before...