MostlyGeek

I just wrote an article on setting up llink for the NETGEAR ReadyNAS. I was planning on going outside today but I started hacking at my new ReadyNAS and wound up spending all Saturday not in the sun but tweaking my new toy. 

Since most of the juice tech bits are in the article so I’ll explain why I geeked out instead of making some vitamin D today. 

It started when I got the Popcorn Hour A-100. The A-100 is a network media player capable of playing 1080p content over the network. I got it plugged into over HDMI to my Toshiba 720p LCD TV in the bedroom with the servers and the storage is all in the living room. 

To get the bits flowing my Airport Express creates a wifi bridge with the Airport Extreme. It’s all 802.11n of course :). I get around 5MB/sec of transfer if nobody is in the washroom. People absorb wifi. It probably doesn’t make much of a difference but I really felt the need to mention that somewhere. 

Anyways, at 5MB/sec, the A-100 took forever to buffer a 720p video. Forever = ~ 45seconds. Turns out accessing the data over CIFS (Windows file sharing) requires me to sacrifice a small critter for better performance. I happen to like the neighbors so another solution was required.  Turns out streaming the content over HTTP with a specialized HTTP server is the answer. A company named Syabas seems to be behind this with their network media streaming products. 

Using the Windows based (ugh!) media streamer the buffering time dropped to around 7 seconds for 720p content.  Wow! I was happy for a little while. Then I was looking at my living with the Windows server, my NAS and all that gear lying around… yuck. 

“Geeze”, I said. I wish I can cram all that stuff into one box. Oh, wait… I can because the ReadyNAS is awesome! Basically what I have now is ReadyNAS running llink with all of its cool features.

Why llink? WTF is llink? You may be asking. llink is a http media streamer. Small, lightweight, supports the features of the A-100, fast and supports unrar. Perhaps its coolest feature is the ability to play media packed inside rar files. Tasty.