Building Media System based on Debian

Technology - To Stream Or Not to Stream?

There is an erroneous belief that media should be streamed and what we watch on youtube, MSN, etc is streamed media. Well, it is not. As can be very clearly seen in this MSN article Microsoft Media "Steaming" does not actually stream. It sends segments of data, can drop some of them if needed and retransmit them as needed. Same for adobe flash players - they do not stream. They simulate a stream to the application using a file oriented transport layer. The reason for this is that this is the only way to provide good end-user experience over packet oriented low level transport like IP. Attempting to do it in any other way results in one of those contraptions that fit into a Tom and Jerry cartoon much better than they fit a real network.

In addition to making the user experience reliable, "faking the stream" also allows most of the control and intelligence to be contained in the front-end and talking to the back-end limited to simple "GET"s of data. That is not the case for true streaming where all of the intelligence is in the streaming server and the client has to talk to the server to implement elementary things like fast-forward or slow motion.

Open Source Efforts

Unfortunately, here open source is either "single machine" or stuck firmly in the past - it tries to do what the commercial media over the internet have long abandoned. There is a number of multiple and equally futile efforts going on - VLM, etc. While entertaining and geeky none of them is worth the effort required to put together a media system in the home. So the choice is either to use MythTV? or DIY. I do not like MythTV? (it is a personal matter) and I do not record shows from TV or satellite so I decided to go the DIY route.

Implementation

• Clients
  • Hardware
  • Candidate Hardware (systems that seem good on spec, but I have yet to look into).
  • Navigation
  • Player set-up?
  • Setting a dual purpose workstation/media console?
• Server and Storage
• Loading Media - DVD and Audio CDs?
• How to Improve?

Conclusions

It is quite easy to hack together a fairly passable media system using Debian and KDE. It may not win a beauty or UI design contests. It will however be perfectly usable and fit for purpose. It will also cost a very small fraction of the cost of a dedicated Windows based Media System like MMC because it can use the old Scott McNealy maxima: "Computer is the network".

Presently, I have 4 clients and a server in the house and I can add a new one in 10-15 minutes if need be.

-- AntonIvanov? - 06 Dec 2008