[Discuss] Google TV vs Apple TV vs Boxee vs Roku vs…

[sweetser at alum.mit.edu (Doug)]

What I care about most is the DLNA feature. The family trove of movies
is sitting in a MyBookLive box on the network. I have not put it under
RAID because I have another copy on a seldom spun up disk. Perhaps the
Boxee can deal with that, but the others are suspect.

I purchase a Panasonic Blue Ray DMP BDT210 player for DVDs. Like those
others media players, it does deal with streaming web site like
Netflix and Hulu+. I only really needed the DVD player, but since they
have embedded linux, they could bundle all these other features.

The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is an effort by Sony so
digital devices can share data via Universal Plug and Play (UPNP).
Sure enough, the Panasonic device was able to find the MyBookLive. It
was able to list the entire collection as expected. Unfortunately, it
could play nothing. Apparently the file system that has the various
videos is not understood by the Panasonic device. So much for DLNA
certification. Perhaps a future update of the system will correct this
flaw. So much for the Universal part of UPNP.

I may try out a Sony media player just for the MyBookLive stuff. Since
they came up with the standard, they probably do the best with it.

Doug