Home Networking 101 - How to stream stuff
Initial set up:
To begin, I am running Windows 7, have a fairly old router (circa 2008/2009ish) by today's standards, PC is directly connected to the router. Because I will be focusing on in home streaming, outside internet connection is irrelevant.
I have gone into my preferences for my internet connection and enabled the homegroup
Initial set up:
To begin, I am running Windows 7, have a fairly old router (circa 2008/2009ish) by today's standards, PC is directly connected to the router. Because I will be focusing on in home streaming, outside internet connection is irrelevant.
I have gone into my preferences for my internet connection and enabled the homegroup
According to this, I should be able to stream videos to my 'homegroup,' which at this point could mean anything. I assume that this will work for files in my Windows directory:
This is fairly useless to me, as I keep nothing in those directories; being that I have multiple drives in my computer. The first folder that I will attempt to share is my music folder, being that I have my music backed up in the non device friendly flac format. My PC is upstairs, which means I still need to pull out the good old fashioned CDs whenever I want to listen to something downstairs on my ancient sound system. While there are some decent sound systems out there with streaming capabilities, most of them lack flac support, and I also lack funds to purchase those sound systems at the moment.
[flac files are different than mp3's because they are essentially a perfect replica of a sound file without any loss in quality due to compression. I like listening to things in high quality, CDs are preferred, but sometimes bands will release flac albums in quality higher than that of regular CDs.]
As a stopgap measure, I will attempt to share one of my favorite albums on my network so that I can stream it in high quality flac to my iPad. The iPad does not natively support flac, mostly just mp3s, mp4s and ALAC. This is the first road bump. Next, one must actually put the music on the iPad in order for it to play it. I know with AppleTV you can stream stuff to it, but again: funding issue and file format issues. But, If I can get flac files to stream to the iPad, then I can just hook up the iPad to my sound system via the headphone jack and listen to some decent quality tunes…fairly wirelessly.
Possible solution and First attempt: I have found an app for the iPad called "Infuse." After launching the app I was prompted to 'add videos.' From there was given a list of possible network connections and successfully connected to my PC:
[flac files are different than mp3's because they are essentially a perfect replica of a sound file without any loss in quality due to compression. I like listening to things in high quality, CDs are preferred, but sometimes bands will release flac albums in quality higher than that of regular CDs.]
As a stopgap measure, I will attempt to share one of my favorite albums on my network so that I can stream it in high quality flac to my iPad. The iPad does not natively support flac, mostly just mp3s, mp4s and ALAC. This is the first road bump. Next, one must actually put the music on the iPad in order for it to play it. I know with AppleTV you can stream stuff to it, but again: funding issue and file format issues. But, If I can get flac files to stream to the iPad, then I can just hook up the iPad to my sound system via the headphone jack and listen to some decent quality tunes…fairly wirelessly.
Possible solution and First attempt: I have found an app for the iPad called "Infuse." After launching the app I was prompted to 'add videos.' From there was given a list of possible network connections and successfully connected to my PC:
Next, I set out to find the album that I wanted to stream and was able to find it:
So far, everything has been going fairly easy. I was able to access the folder, found the files…and then first snag: the files could not be played. I do not know if this is because of the free app limitations, I will investigate further and see at a later time.
Second app: OplayerHD. Went through the same process to set up as the first app, connected to my 'homegroup.' Fairly easy to use and set up like the first app:
Second app: OplayerHD. Went through the same process to set up as the first app, connected to my 'homegroup.' Fairly easy to use and set up like the first app:
Attempt to play album is a success!
Unfortunately there are ads, but if I find this to be the best solution later on, I will most likely purchase the full app. One thing I noticed as well was that the music continued to play after leaving the app and that the iPad shortcuts worked with it.
Next time I will attempt to play flac files from my phone and attempt to stream video to the iPad.
Next time I will attempt to play flac files from my phone and attempt to stream video to the iPad.