New Telly

I bought a new TV, a Sony Bravia KDL-32V5500. It's a shiny thing that has an Ethernet port and is DLNA compliant, so can act as a media player for UPnP devices. I spent a good portion of yesterday trying to set it up. I also own a Lacie 1TB Network Space tiny little NAS. Although the TV saw the NAS without too many problems there was an issue playing MP3s from it. Files would play for about 20 seconds and then cut out with an error, "Playback not available". Obviously this isn't ideal.

I spent ages fiddling with the settings on the NAS, and even longer trying to get a DLNA server set up on the PC and discoverable by the TV. I'm not really kidding when I say I probably could have written a basic server in the same time! Eventually
I got Twonky MediaManager set up. This is, under the hood, a later version of the same software that is running on the NAS. I had it use the NAS as it's content directories for direct comparison -MP3 playback of the same set of songs that had caused issue via DLNA streamed across to the TV fine. So I can only surmise that it's the fault of the underpowered NAS or the version (4.4.6) of Twonky installed on it. On some NASs of this class it's easy to get a root shell and update or even install new software, not on the Lacie which is somewhat locked down. There are some instructions available on how to pop the case and get a root shell by popping the case and connecting the hard drive to a Linux computer. I would prefer a software exploit if possible though -and don't actually know whether Twonky is available for that device in a later version. There are other DLNA servers that I could try running though.

So for now the NAS must remain simple storage unfortunately, and we'll have to play media off our laptops. That will give me some breathing space to think about possibly building an HTPC (the ION Atom boards spring to mind) or getting a PS3 and chucking Linux on it.