This is a Sony BDP-S370. It's a blu-ray player. It also plays DVDs, and SACDs (and normal ones) and perhaps even VCDs if anyone still has any of those. It costs around £120 and I just bought one.
I didn't buy it for any of those functions (although playing DVDs is nice since my old DVD player is dead naff), I bought it because it is a DLNA certified 'network media streamer' or whichever phrase you prefer to use to describe it. This means that if I share my folders full of videos on my home PC, then attach the blu-ray player to the network via it's RJ45 socket, I can watch all of those aforementioned videos on my big living room TV. Happy days!
Actually this isn't something new and exciting for me, I had an xbox 360 in the living room which can perform the same function. But this is a £100 box that also doubles as a super duper new fangled blu-ray player and a DVD player too. Plus it's much smaller. Plus it's much prettier. And it doesn't make any noise (well... a teeny weeny amount of noise, inaudible as far as I'm concerned). Anyone using a 360 to stream media can attest to the ridiculous volume levels you need to set to drown out the console's noisy fans.
Anyway the point of posting this is that, whilst all these sexy functions are obviously great, getting it working isn't always incredibly easy. If you are running Windows 7 on your 'server' PC, you are set. Good to go. No problems, Windows Media Player 12 will act as a DLNA server and your PC will appear in the 'network' tab on the S370's main menu (as long, of course, as you have enabled media sharing in the Network and Sharing Centre). If, however, your media server is using XP or (dare I say it..) Vista, you need a separate server application. It took a lot of goes to find one that worked (I had TVersity running when I had a 360, no go with the BR player) but I finally did and it seems entirely perfect. It is...
TVMOBiLi - tvmobili.com
Installation is simple, and setup is all via a web interface. Once you've installed it, and assuming your BR player is turned on, it should appear in the 'discovered devices' section of the status page like so.
On your S370 your computer should appear in the list of network services. Now you can navigate through all the folders you should choose to share through TVMOBiLi - simply go onto the 'settings' page in the web interface (I'd strongly recommend a bookmark / favourite for this page!) and tap in the details under 'New Directory' at the bottom. You might want to remove the default shares - the usual crap like 'my videos' etc.
After that it's time to enjoy your vast library of intellectual programming from the comfort of your sofa!
The S370 can also, should you be interested in buying one, access the BBC iPlayer service and Demand Five. Oddly enough the Demand Five service is the faster and more easy to use of the two, but regardless of that just having them directly on the TV rather than using a computer is an excellent feature. It also supports several other 'on demand' services dependant on geography, I'm obviously using mine in the UK. It's well worth a hundred quid (£120 at time of going to press, sorry looks like I got a bargain!) of anyone's money.
The steps above will also apply to users of the BDP-S570 (flash gits) and any Bravia television sets with DLNA capabilities.
