Information yearns to be free, but music and video long to be everywhere
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| QNAP’s TS-109 Pro is not only a fast NAS box, its feature set rivals that of a full-fledged server. |
There’s a lot of territory to cover here, but it boils down to this: Your media (music, video, digital photos, television programming, and so on) originates from location A, and you want to enjoy it at location B.
A media-center extender can stream any digital content from one room to another. If you don’t have Windows Media Center, there are a host of products capable of streaming music, pre-recorded video, live or recorded TV, music, and digital photos from your PC. A wide variety of products can stream music from a PC, and a number of docking stations will do the same from an iPod. If you’d like to watch TV programming from a remote location or on your smartphone, you’ll want a location-shifting device such as the Slingbox.
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| The Sonos Digital Music System is the best multizone music-streaming product we’ve encountered—well worth the $1,000 price tag for a two-room system. |
Choosing the right server is easy compared to finding the right tool for streaming music, video, and digital photographs—there are just so many options to choose from. Your first step is to decide what you want to stream and where you want to stream it.
A media-center extender, such as the Linksys $250 DMA2100 (or an Xbox 360), can do it all, but these devices require that the host PC be running a version of Windows that includes Windows Media Center. Unfortunately, the latest (and most capable) media-center extenders are not compatible with Windows XP. On the other hand, one of the few features that renders Vista superior to Windows XP is its ability to record and stream copy-protected content from your cable-TV system.
But there’s a major catch: You’ll need a CableCARD tuner in your PC, and the only way to get one is as part of a new, prebuilt system. Satellite TV customers are entirely out of luck—there’s no CableCARD equivalent for satellite. A/V streamers such as Netgear’s EVA8000 ($350) or the PlayStation 3 ($400) can do most everything that a media-center extender can do—except stream encrypted television programming.
The most important aspects of a music-streaming system are audio quality, the remote control, the software for the host PC, support for third-party services (such as Rhapsody and Pandora), and capacity for building a multiroom system. Logitech’s Squeezebox (from $300) and the Sonos Digital Music System (from $600) are tops in this category.
Once you’ve selected a server, you’ll want to build a good directory structure on the rig that’s not only easy to maintain and back up but also secure from accidental deletions and malware running on other machines on your network.
While you could put all your files in one giant folder and share that folder, it is much more effective to create individual shares for your music, movies, and photos. That way you can control your users’ access levels based on the type of content in the shares. While everyone should have read access to photos, you may want only one or two people to be able to write to the photo folder.
To access the advanced permissions dialogs, go into the Folder Options control panel, click the View tab, and uncheck “Use sharing wizard” in Vista or “Use simple file sharing” in XP.
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| 1. CONFIGURE GROUPS: First, you need to create and populate groups with users. You should create groups based on tasks they’ll perform—for example, Music Listeners and Music Admins—and then set permissions to allow the lowest level of access that your users will need to complete those tasks. Once you’ve decided who gets read access and who gets write access, go to Administrative Tools, Users & Groups to set up your groups. |
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| 2. ASSIGN PERMISSIONS TO FOLDERS: Once you’ve created your groups and filled them with users, you need to enable sharing and adjust the permissions on the folders you want to share. Right-click the folder you want to share and select the Sharing option. Vista users need to click Advanced Sharing and then Permissions. Add your groups and set the permissions you want to allow, removing the Everyone option. |
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| 3. BACK UP YOUR FOLDERS: Now repeat the same steps for your photo and video folders. Once that’s done, you should set up a regular backup procedure for you media folders. Even though you’ve protected your photos, music, and movies from accidental erasure at the hands of family members, you still need to do regular backups. We recommend using SyncBack Freeware, which you can download at www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html. |
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