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Paul B
Tea drinking geek

The Sorry State of Media Streaming in 2016

How hard can it be to stream the media files on my laptop to my television? TL;DR — much harder than it should be in 2016.

My scenario isn’t that unusual. I have a Mac which has most of my media files on. Several years ago I went through a major exercise of converting all my DVDs to electronic format — much like a video version of what we all did converting our audio CDs to MP3 many years ago — with the intention of setting up some kind of home media server.

For a while, I had a semi-working solution. I had a LACIE NAS with all the files on it, and the device was compliant with the DLNA standard. I then bought a Sony Bravia TV which claimed to be DNLA compliant… only to discover that it only supported the streaming of audio, not video. My solution was to use my PS3 which also supports DNLA, and the problem was basically solved.

The system had problems though. The NAS was flaky and noisy, and it was yet another device to turn on. So when I moved house a couple of years ago I never bothered to set things up again. Now here we are in 2016 and I’ve decided to give it another go, only to be hugely disappointed. The field feels like it’s moved backwards if anything.

Ideally, I’d like to stream the video straight from my Mac to the PS4 which has now replaced the PS3 under my TV. So what I need is a piece of software which sits on my Mac and shares the media over my local network. A quick search identifies several pieces of software which should do this in theory…

  • Plex is a piece of software which everyone seems to rave about, but it seems overly bloated for what I want to do. It supports DNLA and also has a native PS4 app, but the latter requires me to create a Plex account just to stream files between two devices on my own network. Overkill.
  • Serviio looks like a great solution, but once I had installed it I found it simply didn’t work. After a bit of digging around, it turns out that it needs Java to be installed… Java brings a whole host of security headaches with it, so I’m giving this one a miss.
  • It’s a similar story with Universal Media Server, which has great reviews but needs Java to be installed in order to work.
  • There’s an old piece of software called PS3 Media Server which works, but it doesn’t seem to like any of the file formats I’m using.
  • Then there are solutions like Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) but again this is overkill — it offers a full UI for browsing media on the host device, but I simply want it to stream so I can pick up that media in the PS4 media player app.

I suspect that the walled gardens are a big reason behind this. After all, Apple would prefer that I just buy all my media from them, get an Apple TV and send everything to it using Airplay. Sony would probably prefer me to purchase media direct on my PS4 or use some of their approved apps such as Netflix.

I know I haven’t explored all the options. I know there are solutions offered in the Mac App store, and there are other open source solutions too… but my gripe is that it’s 2016 and there’s no clear and easy way of doing what should be a very simple thing.