The New Toy solves a problem

I just picked up a Buffalo wireless Link Theatre that allows me to stream videos I download directly to the TV. No longer really have to burn a dvd to watch the flic. Was Easy to Setup by reading the manual....arrrrgh! $250 bucks on EBAY.

 

 

LinkTheater™ Wireless-A&G Network Media Player includes 802.11a/g wireless networking, digital 5.1 audio outputs, a USB port, S-video and component video outputs, and the ability to natively play many of the latest audio/video formats. It will stream multimedia from a Windows PC, a LinkStation™ Home Server, a TeraStation™ Home Server, USB storage devices, or any DLNA CERTIFIED™ media server device. Listen to music, view photos, watch videos and browse files - all on your TV!

 

Intel® Viiv™ Technology-Verified Media Player

• Dual-band 2.4 GHz 802.11g and 5 GHz 802.11a wireless for interference-free playback
• Play back from any Windows® PC, Intel® Viiv™ PC, Buffalo Home Server, DLNA CERTIFIED™ Media Server, UPnP Server or USB storage device
• Video formats: MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, XviD, WMV, H.264 (MPEG4 AVC)
• Audio formats: MP3, WAV, WMA, M4A (AAC), LPCM, AC3
• Image formats: JPG, BMP, PNG
• Video modes: 480i, 480p, and 720p
• Included Remote Control for Easy Access to all Media Content (Batteries Included)
• Easy Playback from Buffalo LinkStation™ Home Server and/or TeraStation™ Home Server Series Products (sold separately)
• Built-in 10/100 LAN Port
• Analog (Composite) Audio/Video Connectors
• D4/Component Video Connectors

• Optical Audio Connectors

Seems to work fairly well unless I'm downloading other things. I've knocked off the video stream a few times already and had to start over. I'll probably run a cat5 wire from my router directly to it eventually...but for now...

The latest Vongo Build still applies the DRM stuff but I am able to watch the movies thru the new toy now without having to run it through Tunebite. They moved the default library folder to an odd place in a hidden folder. The server can see the folder now that I unhid it and since Vongo changed the way they format the files. Before you could only watch the movies through thier player but now they also play through Windows Media Player. This is what prompted me to pick up the LinkTheatre.

Eventually I'm gonna get a 2TB external drive that has raid-5 so if a drive goes out It can rebuild the data. I'll still need to backup of course but not as often. Since this works actually better than expected, I'll do that after the taxman coughs up my loot.

I'm thinking that Vongo Has over a 1000 movies available to download and watch at any one time so I'll never actually get bored with my collection. Unfortunately, there is no settings in the software to move the library folder Vongo uses so I have to modify the registry when I'm ready. That will be easy since I found the reg key and exported it. Pretty easy to modify it and then merge it back into the registry at any time. 

My biggest gripe is the wireless dropping and causing a vid to rebuffer. So at this point I called Buffalo tech support and he suggested possibly locking down the router to either channel 1, 6 or 11 because they aren't shared channels. I asked him also about thier fileservers and reliability that they have seen etc. Odds of two drives going down at same time are almost non-existent and data recovery is almost always successful. Thier units us a web-based software raid setup.

Anyway I've set the router to wireless g only mode and forced channel 6 and a movie is playing ok at the moment.

This just IN.....

Works great be back later gott download some new movies!

 

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