Every Flavour Beans

There is no arguing that as soon as you replace the headphones that come with Nokia N800 Internet Tablet with any other decent quality headphones, you have got yourself an excellent music player. The playback quality is good and the user interface of the default media player is far better than that of a typical MP3 player(large size, touch screen etc.). The only downside is that the N800 comes with a meagre storage memory of 256MB! OK, you can stop laughing now, it does come with two memory slots enabling you to expand the storage capacity to 8/16 GB. 2 GB SD cards especially are very cheap on Amazon or eBay. Not interested in spending more money? You have a way out: Nokia N800 is a UPnP AV device which means that all you need to stream your entire music collection from a computer to N800 tablet is a UPnP AV MediaServer.

But what is a UPnP AV MediaServer? Let’s ask Wikipedia for help:

UPnP AV MediaServers store and share digital media, such as photographs, movies, or music [with UPnP AV Clients like N800]. There are UPnP MediaServers available for most operating-systems and many hardware-platforms. Software-based UPnP AV MediaServers can be run on PCs (Personal-Computers), mainly on Microsoft Windows, Linux, BSD, Unix or Mac OS X.

What does this translate to in the context of N800? It means that we can turn any computer that has access to our music collection into a media server that can stream the music to N800 directly over the wifi/network connection. This has become an absolute ‘new’ favourite feature of mine and I no more try to store as much music as I can cramp on the 8GB cards of my N800; instead, I just run a Media Server software on the computer, point it to my entire music collection(~80GB) and access it all from the media player of Nokia N800. Let us see how simple one way to setup N800 with a Media Server software.

If you are a Windows Vista user, almost everything needed to setup N800 for media streaming is already available for you :) It is because Windows Media Player 11 has built-in support for UPnP media streaming. (Not to say that it is any difficult to setup media streaming in GNU/Linux, as we will see in future posts.)

To configure which music/picture folders should be shared with the UPnP devices(N800), fire up Windows Media Player 11 from the Start menu(you use Launchy? Good for you) and go to the Tools -> Options window(pressing the “ALT” key will show the main menu). On the “Library” tab, click the “Monitor Folders” button and add as many folders as you want to share using the “Add” button. When finished, dismiss all the dialog boxes and close or minimise Windows Media Player.

Boot N800 if it is not already powered on, start the default Media Player(or MediaStreamer if it is installed), and in its Library you will find a new entry listed under the name of your computer, which is the WMP 11 MediaServer. Click this entry to browse all the music and pictures that you have set for sharing.

Note: If you feel like changing the settings used to share the files in Windows Media Player, then go to the same Library page under Tools -> Options window and click the “Configure Sharing” button. In the pop-up window, click the “Settings…” button and customise the way you want to share the music, pictures and the videos…wait, strike that video part out, it is a hopeless case to try to play video on N800 streamed from Windows Media Player!

Using Windows Media Player 11 in Vista to stream music to N800 is the easiest setup, but definitely not the only one. You can setup older versions of Windows Media Player if you are a Windows XP user but you need a non-free plugin for that I believe. But the real fun starts when you install and configure a real UPnP MediaServer to work with N800, such as TVersity. Many of them support video transcoding and streaming too! Music can be streamed to N800 using other methods too, over HTTP using SlimServer, DAAP using Rhythmbox etc. And of course you can use other UPnP client software(say MediaStreamer) in N800 and not just the default media player. The possibilities are endless for a capable device with an open development platform! More to come in future posts.

Winding up what I had said in the beginning of the post, media streaming is not a complete replacement for the lack of decent storage available on N800. To carry music wherever you want to take N800, buying additional SD cards is a must. The only other option will be to setup the media stream server to stream music over the Internet and access the shared music from Nokia N800 through a wifi hotspot or a service-enabled phone, in which case, good luck with the streaming speed!