Steve,
I went through this very thing, trying to find a good but fairly
accessible way to stream media to my fairly high end home entertainment
setup in our living room and never found anything I was truly pleased
with.
Last year I decided to go the way of a pc with XP installed on it and it
was the best decision I could have made. It doesn't even have to be
media center. I have an Ethernet connection now in the living room, but
for quite a while I simply used 802.11g and it worked fine. I had
access to all of my music, and being a NetFlix subscriber, I am also
able to stream movies from the NetFlix site.
This is all done on a refurbished machine that I picked up for around
$250. I simply installed an old SoundBlaster Live card I had lying
around to give me digital out for audio
Since my wife and daughter needed good video for the Netflix movies, I
bought a video card from NewEgg with DVI output to go to our hd TV so
video looks great. You have to match the output of the video card to
whatever your TV accepts like DVI, HDMI, or Component if you care about
video.
I use either Winamp or Itunes for streaming my music from a network
drive and it sounds terrific.
To me, this is the best setup because it is easy, in expensive, and
perfectly accessible.
RA
On 5/6/2009 6:22 AM, Steve Matzura wrote:
I'm always after a better solution to my same old problem of streaming
Internet audio to a non-Internet device, such as my living-room
entertainment center, or my bedside radio. I'm so disgusted with the
FM transmitter thing because of all the metal studs in my walls, I'm
once again looking at something I can use with my wireless router, put
it anywhere, and plug it up to an audio device as described above. A
Media Center PC might be a good alternative, but are they under $500
yet? The $500 price point is based on the price of a rather
interesting piece of gear from Logitech that will do the job and even
allow direct access to one's own media library, but of course it's
hopelessly inaccessible by a totally blind person. The Media Center
PC, however, could be made accessible simply by installing a
screenreader on it, even if it's Narrator or one of the free ones out
there--we're not doing rocket science projects on it, we're just
picking music and playing it, so it won't matter how good the
screenreader is or isn't. Like I said, even Narrator'll do for this
purpose! And for your five portraits of Mr. Franklin, you get a real
computer to boot!
Has anybody had any experience with any of these streaming products
like the Logitech one? Or is it your considered opinion to go the PC
or cheap Mac route?
Thanks in advance.
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