Stream media to your TV or PS3

It's an odd situation, that many of us may find us in: You have your great home cinema system setup, with a giant TV screen and a 7.1 surround sound system, most likely in our living room. Yet most of your music and movies are sitting in on the PC in the work room. What to do? Well you may not know it, but your TV may be able to do more than you think. The keyword here is DLNA. After the break I will show you how I got my Sony TV to play all my media on my iMac, including purchased iTunes music over the home network. This will also work for a PS3, and may work for other DLNA enabled devices. Furthermore the software involved is open-source and platform independent so this should work for Linux and Windows users as well.

What you will first need to do is check whether your TV supports DLNA. Many newer TV sets do, and the PS3 most definitely does. If you find it does, you will then need to make sure your TV is in the local network. The easiest way to achieve this is to plug in your TV to your router using an Ethernet cable. Many TVs then have an option to verify your connectivity. If your TV supports WLAN, you may want to use that instead.

Next, you will want to setup a DLNA server on your computer. A list of servers, both proprietary and open-source, can be found on this page. I went along with PS3 Media Server, which is an open-source Java application with a slick GUI. (I have to admit that I first wanted a GUI-less daemon DLNA server, but all the ones that I did try did not seem to work correctly on my Mac. Your mileage may vary). Anyway, after you have downloaded the app, turn on your TV. On your PC, launch the PS3 DLNA server. If everything worked correctly, you should see your TV or PS3 show up in the app. For instance I see my Sony BRAVIA show up at the bottom of main window:

You will most likely get a warning if your DLNA client is not a PS3 (as I do), but you can safely ignore that. You can now go to the "Navigation/Share Settings" tab, and choose the media you would like to share. The great thing about PS3 Media Server is that it will transcode any media the PS3 does not recognize on-the-fly. It uses mplayer and ffmpeg among others, so virtually any media file should work. On the downside, the bundled ffmpeg (at least on the Mac) is not optimally configured: By default I could not get any purchased iTunes music to play on my TV. Now this is not copy-protected music, but iTunes Plus tracks, which have no DRM protection. So, if you want to get your iTunes purchased tracks to play on your TV, you will need to install your own version of ffmpeg. The easiest way to do this is as always using MacPorts. Install ffmpeg by typing:

sudo port install ffmpeg

Once installed, open the application bundle of the PS3 Media Server application, and rename the ffmpeg executable in Contents/Resources/Java/osx/ffmpeg to ffmpeg_off. Then symlink your own version of ffmpeg at that location. Both of these steps can most easily be carried out on the command line:

cd /Applications/PS3\ Media\ Server.app/Contents/Resources/Java/osx/
mv ffmpeg ffmpeg_off
ln -s /opt/local/bin/ffmpeg ./ffmpeg

Voila! After relaunching PS3 Media Server you should now be able to stream your purchased iTunes music (as long as there is no DRM protection) to your TV. Quick tip: To find out if your music is protected simply find it in iTunes, and hit Cmd-i to bring up the information window. If the "Kind" field says "Protected AAC audio file" then it is obviously protected and cannot be streamed. If on the other hand, it says "Purchased AAC audio file" you are good to go:

Below is a photo of my TV playing a purchased iTunes file. Though the GUI is simple, it gets the job done. I was also able to play any video file I threw at it.

As always, leave your experiences in the comments!