J_K9 @ Linux

Why Is Achieving Simplicity So Difficult?

September 29, 2007 on 12:42 am | In Hyperactive |

Having spent the past five or so hours trying to connect my Ubuntu 7.04 laptop and Windows XP desktop to my Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles so that I can stream media from one to the other with almost no success, perhaps it is a little too easy for me to say this. I can imagine all the effort that went into coding the media centres for both consoles—that I will not dispute. But how on earth can they have made it so complex, so embedded in proprietary ways, that it just refuses to work no matter which media server I use?

I have tried just about every major UPnP media server available on the internet, from Open Source to Free Software to good old proprietary. I have tried Mediatomb, TVersity, TwonkyVision, Nero 7 MediaHome, Windows Media Player 11 and several others on all the Operating Systems they were compiled for (yes, including Mac OS X—I forgot to mention my ageing but powerful iMac G5). The only one I had some success with was Mediatomb; the others were completely useless and incompatible with the consoles.

Not only did I have problems at the server end, but the consoles were also playing up on me. My PS3 has decided that UPnP is “not available” and that my network is a “NAT Type 3″ ever since its last update, which essentially means that there’s no way in hell it’s going to find my server. Then there’s the Xbox, which struggles (and fails) to find even the media server created by its own owner, incorporated into Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 11.

I can’t help but think to myself: how pathetic is this? Are Sony and Microsoft so set in their ways that they cannot agree upon Open Standards to ensure simplicity and compatibility across a range of technologies included in their products? Is it too difficult to agree on some basic requirements for the implementation of these technologies to ensure that they do not differ too much, so that the end-user can truly have a “Plug and Play” experience?

I consider myself an advanced user and I was unsuccessful in my attempts to get this set-up working in my home network. If I was unable to do it, how can Sony and Microsoft possibly expect less experienced users to accomplish this seemingly insurmountable task?

I could go on for quite a bit ranting about how despicable this is, but then I’d just be wasting more time on these “home consoles” which Microsoft and Sony have so lovingly produced. The games and graphics are great, that I will admit—but if you’re going to add media centre functionality, make sure you do it right. Don’t give me some semi-working system which never will quite work as I’m made to believe it can (thank you, marketing departments—ever trustworthy).

Next time I want to stream videos to my TV, I’ll shove a network card into it with some software to output Ogg Theora files to the screen and I’ll transcode and stream videos to it on-the-fly from my PC. No UPnP, no proprietary formats or technologies, no unnecessary crap. Keep it simple and it will work reliably and with as little extra pain as possible.

Hey, that’s not too bad an idea… I better get working on a business plan!

And yes, I do know it’s not that simple to network-enable a TV