Every Flavour Beans

Media Streamer is a useful little application available for Nokia N800 Internet tablet that automatically searches for the UPnP AV media servers available in the range, connects to them and plays the media made available by them. The default media player that comes pre-installed in Nokia N800 also allows discovery of UPnP devices and playing streamed media but it is slow and isn’t great looking, where as Media Streamer looks slick and beautiful and the user interface is amazingly responsive (and intuitive) for a media player. It has the best UI of all media players I have used on Nokia N800 so far(Canola, Kagu, UKMP, Kaligi). Perhaps its limited feature set gives its interface an edge over the others’ but I anyway like applications that do one thing and do it well.

NOTE: If you are running Vista operating system, you can use Windows Media Player 11 as a Media Server to work with Media Streamer for N800. Other options include TVersity, Fuppes, Twonky; here is a list of Media Servers to choose from.

Installing Media Streamer on Nokia N800

1. Select Tools -> Application manager
2. Tap on Browse Installable Applications and then on All

button

3. Find Media Streamer in the list, select it and tap on Install button in the bottom.

Or download the latest version on N800 from the Maemo Garage website and click on it to install(not recommended as any updates will not be notified automatically).

Playing Media from UPnP AV Media Server Using Media Streamer

After Media Streamer is installed, it can be started from the Extras menu. As soon as it starts, it searches for any UPnP AV media servers available in the range and will show the list of found devices in the left half pane of the screen.

Select the one you want to connect to(in case there is more than one listed) and you will see all the type of media made available by that media server. Most probably you will see the three categories “Audio/Music,” “Photos/Pictures,” and “Video” or something on those lines(exact options depends on the selected Media Server application). Selecting “Music” will display different ways to view the available songs such as by Album name or by Genre. My favourite is the “Folders” view which allows me to browse all the available music just the way they are stored on the file-system. This is very useful when the music is not properly tagged or songs from multiple albums(“Top 10″) are stored in one folder.

Small curved-arrow icon at the top of left-pane will always take you to the previous view.

Media Streamer searches for any new devices that become available in the range periodically but you can always refresh the list of devices manually from its top menu(Tools -> Refresh Devices).

Below are some more screenshots showing the “Library” and “Now Playing” views.

Select a folder/album and tap on “Add to Playlist” button to add all the songs in it to the “Now Playing” list.

You can also add songs to the library by selecting them one-by-one.

“Now Playing” view. If the album art is embedded in the songs, Media Streamer displays it. If not, it uses the default image, as can be seen in the screenshot below.

Biggest plus for Media Streamer in my opinion is its flawless user interface. The only downside I can see is the lack of proper error reporting when something goes wrong(e.g. format of the media not supported), Media Streamer simply doesn’t play the file and says nothing else. Do note that it’s a non-Free application.