Literally minutes of fun

[mark1234]

Don't know why I've never tried this before, but I had a little fun earlier.

I was using WMP on my laptop to play some music whilst I made tea. I happened to notice that when I right-clicked on the playlist there was a Play To option and the DMA2200 extender was listed. So, obviously, I clicked it and waited. Thirty seconds later and my son arrives saying his programme stopped and music started playing. He was going to accuse me of hiding behind the door and using a remote - moi?

I gave him chance to restart his programme then did the Send To again. And again. And so on. After a few minutes he says he's giving up on trying to watch his programme as it keeps stopping to play music. I tried to be a bit glass-half-full by asking if they were good songs (I already knew they were) but he wasn't interested.

Anyone else had fun with this, otherwise pointless, feature?

[holidayboy]

Works for the echo too, like you say, its not that useful day to day, but it is a neat feature.

[kingwr]

Poor man's AirPlay. But, no, I never really had any use (or fun) with it beyond just figuring out that it worked. That said, I use the AirPlay feature of my AppleTV from my iPhone, iPad, or Macbook all the time to watch YouTube videos, look at pictures, show a Web page, etc. My family is still impressed every time I say "let me put this up on the big screen."

[holidayboy]

Air... wot? i.... wot?

[mark1234]

It's just like Microsoft stuff, except people actually use it!

[kingwr]

The reason it's not used is that it's NOT just like AirPlay. In AirPlay, the content is rendered on the computer/tablet/phone and a content stream is sent to the AirPlay device (I think it's a proprietary AirPlay protocol). This makes AirPlay format independent. As long as the computer/device can render the content, it can be played or shown on the TV, AVR, whatever. "Play To" in Windows Media Player streams the file to the device without regard to device capabilities. The device simply looks like a "media renderer" to the computer and Media Player streams the content. If the device can play it, great. If not (which is more likely than not), you get an error, even if the Windows computer is perfectly capable of rendering the file. I think this is why it is of little use -- poor choice of implementation.


EDIT: perhaps I should say different choice of implementation, not poor choice. There are plenty of reasons why Microsoft's implementation of Play To is better. AirPlay is horribly inefficient -- it requires portable devices to stream content over the wireless LAN, transcode the content to Air Play, restream the AirPlay content over the wireless LAN, and then have the display device decode and render the content. This is why a lot of apps (IMO) don't support AirPlay, like Amazon VOD. It takes some pretty slick programming to make your device do this efficiently and reliably. Microsoft's implementation is much more streamlined, but requires more capabilities on the media renderer end (which is often out of Microsoft's control).

[mark1234]

According to MS, the Play To feature (which is part of DLNA) will transcode if the target device can't natively play the format being streamed.

Let’s say for instance you have a DivX movie you want to watch on your new DLNA certified television which only supports WMV and MPEG2. Windows 7 will determine the capability of the TV (codec, bit rate, etc.) and dynamically convert the DivX video to a format the TV can play.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009 ... ows-7.aspx

[mcewinter]

The iTunes version of this will play to more than one Apple TV and/or Airport Express and will play in sync providing wholehouse music. 'Play to' is pretty useless in a wholehouse scenario...messing with the kids is cool though.

...and the 'Remote' app makes it super easy to control.

[mark1234]

...messing with the kids is cool though.

And that's the important part here!