Unless you’ve hanging around dark unmentionable places, you probably know that I love technology, but more often than not the love returned is not equal to the love I give.
In October, 2008, I brought a HP Mediasmart Server running Windows Home Server. I have been in love with this box since day one. I’ve upgraded the memory and installed additional hard drives to make this, to put it bluntly, a kick butt machine. It has a very small footprint and is exceptionally quiet. The server backs up every computer every night between 2 and 4 AM without fail. If a computer is off (sleep), it will wake up the machine, back it up and let it go back to sleep. All of our pictures, music and favorite movies and videos are store on that box. Built on Windows Server 2003, the device is more than capable of handling our needs as it streams different music and videos to different computers simultaneously without missing a beat or stuttering. It even handles remote access which allows me to log into the server from work and retrieve a file if I need it.
My problem? I’m greedy and I want it to do more. I want to watch a movie that is stored on the server on the TV in the living room or the TV in the bedroom without a computer involved. Yup, I want to stream media (my favorite computer term) from the server to a non computer appliance (appliance – another computer term I love). It turns out that what I was looking for was a – gaming console. So now I am the proud owner of an Xbox 360.
I’ve hooked the Xbox to the media center in the living room, attached and configured a wireless G adapter and I was in heaven. I was able to stream movies and music directly from the server and watch the media in another part of the house. Alas, the Xbox had difficulty streaming some of my AVI files, especially those I created years ago when I was learning how to create them. It had no problem with WMV files, and I started converting all of my AVI files to WMV. It streams those movies with no stuttering or buffering issues.
By the way, I’m not a “gamer” and even through the Xbox came with two games, they’ve never been played and remain unopened. I didn’t buy the console to play games. I bought it to stream movies and let me tell you, the Xbox is a welcome addition to my home computer network. And that is something I thought I’d never say about any gaming console.
