What if you only want to stream to a laptop or another PC? All you need is some software. A dedicated media streamer is all well and good, but most of them cost in the region of $200 to $400, which certainly doesn’t make them the cheapest solution. If you want to view pictures or listen to audio on your laptop, or another PC in the house, then all you need to do is set up a shared folder, then browse to it on the network and open the files in the same way that you would do on the local machine.
As long as your network has the range, taking your laptop into the garden and plugging in some external speakers, is possibly the simplest way of getting music to your garden party. However, Windows networking is notoriously fickle, especially if you are mixing operating systems, so a dedicated software solution may be better.
Windows Media Player 11 is built into Windows Vista and can be downloaded for XP and once set up for sharing, WMP11 turns your PC with the media library into a media server. A Vista laptop will usually automatically detect a shared library and ask whether you want to connect to it. You can also share your iTunes library, and then access it from another PC or laptop running iTunes.
However, one of our favorite solutions for sharing media is Orb (www.orb.com), which enables you to share music, video, pictures and documents, not just across your local network, but across the internet as well. It’s a great way to listen to your music collection when you’re at work, a friend’s house or anywhere else that you can get a respectable internet connection. Not only is Orb free, but you can use it to stream your files to the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii and even some handhelds, like the iPod touch and mobile phones. An alternative is TVersity, which will also work with any internet connected device that has a web browser that supports Flash.
Tags: External Speakers, Getting Music, Handhelds, ipod Touch, Local Network, Media Library, Media Server, Media Streamer, Music Collection, Music Video, Nintendo Wii, Orb, Playstation 3, Software, Software Solution, streaming, Tversity, Wii, Windows Media Player, Windows Networking, Wmp11, Xbox 360
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