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[quote author=“Masculatron”]Hey everyone, I’m still absolutley in love with my TR, but I need some insight. I want to set up a simple and small home media server/network but I don’t know what I need or how to do it from a software standpoint. Here’s my setup:

I have my TR with it’s integrated wireless and I have a desktop I built two years ago…<snip>

This computer is hardwired to our linksys wireless router. What software do I need and how would I go about setting up a system that would let my TR access media (mainly music) files on the desktop computer? Any help or advice you can give is enormously appreciated. I read an article that touched on using Shoutcast, but I haven’t a clue how to use it. Sorry if I’m a ridiculosuly naive user in this respect.

Thanks,
Masculatron

Sony has media server software that I accidentally activated on my new TR3, it has an option for installing itself on other computers. I seem to recall reading somewhere on one of the myriad sony sites that it will only work on vaio computers. Nothing I’ve found in the installation on my machine mentions it either way. (not to say it’s not there)

I have to believe that serving media from a TR would really be counterproductive between processor overhead and battery drain. As for video, I have a hard time rationalizing wear-and-tear on a $2000+ laptop to watch TV around my house. Different strokes.

That said, If you have an MP3 library and player software you like, install a copy of the player on the TR and just point it through the network to the files on your desktop machine.

Well I use my desktop as a music server as it has a 120gig hard drive.  Personally I just use winamp 5 and just add the music to a playlist by selecting the network location.  Then I can just select what I want as normal and away I go.

I’ve also tried streaming movies in the same way, but 11b isn’t quite upto that so I normally just get the crossover network cable out and transfer them first!

Basically I approach from the fact that if you share the media on one computer then you can access is as if it was on the laptop.

iTunes and VLC are both worth looking at for this application.

Is HD space the reason why you guys are talking about this.  I mean, if the TR had an 80Gb HD, then you could host your MP3 library locally….right?

Theoretically, any computer in the network can be a server and disk capacity only limits how much is available. My point is that the computer must be on and *connected* to the network, hardly a good occupation for a laptop. Best option IMHO is to take a page from the-way-we’ve-always-done-it and have a box over in the corner who’s only purpose in life is to run 24/7 and fileserve.

One other consideration, you can put 900-1000 mp3 encoded songs on a single DVD (or give up 4.7g drive space) so if you’re out and about with your TR you should have enough music to last you an hour or two. :wink: