Today Nokia Press Bulletin Board posted a video demonstrating how to use DLNA to stream things to and from your Nokia N95 8GB, this also works with any UPnP enabled phone (read: Nseries after the N80). I’ve never had much interest in the little “house” icon on my phone, mainly because I didn’t knew how to use it :p but after a little reading (on the PS3 forums nonetheless!) I have setuped and am using it, here’s how I’ve done it:
Part 1: Setting up your home network in the app:
Just follow the steps selecting your wifi connection (in my case, “internets”)
You end with something like this
That’s it! Now for the server part:
Part 2: Windows
You’ll need any PC with WMP11 installed, open WMP and find the Media Sharing menu item:
Click it, mark the two boxes, and in the Home media app click Browse home, it will connect to your wifi and look something like this
Select the name of your computer (in my case, “VISTA-PC”), the app will give you a message “access denied” or something, and your PC screen will look like this:
In this screen select the “Unknown Device” and click the allow button.
That’s it! Now you can browse your WMP library on your phone, copy and stream files! But this wasn’t over for me, for some reason the phone had a lag of about a minute when starting to stream a song, and my music is mainly on my iTunes library on my Mac, so I’d have to find a similar way…
Part 3: Mac OS X
Apple wasn’t so nice to include a UPnP AV server like Microsoft did, so you’ll have to download one, in my experiences trying, the one that worked best was Elgato’s EyeConnect, so go to their website, download and install it (it’s a trial version, but you can continue to use the audio part when it expires), it will open a prefpane like this one:
This one is a lot easier to set-up, just try to connect with your phone and this will allow it in the first try, so you can just browse your computer.
Impressions
Now is where it gets tricky, is this worth doing? On windows for example, transfer speeds are pretty bad, but are acceptable. On Mac OS, transfer speeds are a lot faster, but the artists are not sorted alphabetically:
This makes it quite difficult to find what you’re looking for, especially in a big iTunes library like mine.
After the slowness and disorganization ae left behind, this is actually a pretty good solution for getting music on your phone wirelessly, you can copy the files or play right in the app:
No matter if you just copy, or play the file in the app, the songs will be stored in E:/Download/Media:
To transfer my music I had used SymSMB 2.0 before, and (after Apple broke Mac OS’ SMB with Leopard, grr) SIC Ftp (lol @ name :P). DLNA is clearly superior (bonus points for it because of automatic adding to Music Player, avoiding the ultra slow refresh), the only things missing are quick “streaming-like” file playing (now it needs to download the whole 1st track before playing an album), and a search field like in contacts, for searching artists. But for me that didn’t even knew how to use this app, being able to put it in my daily used apps is already something!
EDIT: After a reboot, Elgato’s server is showing artists in alphabetical order, odd.
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