This is the first time in a while I’ve had a free Sunday, and I’ve taken the opportunity to sort out my LinkStation. The LinkStation is a 250GB network attached storage device, which happens to run Linux. It hadn’t been recognising the USB drive I have attached to it, so I stupidly upgraded the firmware and promptly lost all the hacks that it had - telnet wouldn’t let me in anymore and the media server which ran on it was wiped off.

It now has the latest OpenLink firmware (thankfully puts sshd on the device) and TwonkyVision 2.9.1.

So what’s the point of all this? Wirelessly streaming to my TV mp3s and (ripped) DVDs without a computer being turned on, using the industry standard uPnP mediaserver protocol.

So I now have the serving all sorted. The problem I have now is that although my Streamium is great for mp3s, streaming of videos and radios from the Internet, it’s utterly lowsy at DVD rips which haven’t been transcoded. It just can’t cope with 6+mbit mpeg streams (raw VOBs). Pretty crummy.

TwonkyVision has a page of all the uPnP servers, the z500 looks like it has the best specs (HDMI!) but they don’t seem to sell to the UK and who’s ever heard of Zensonic, anyway?

Oh yeah, and Philip’s new SLA5500 device looks great. I want one for my bedroom. But it’s not out yet.