The Real Scoop On Philips' Streamium

UVwarning writes with his review of the Philips Streamium MCi-200. "The MCi-200 is an internet micro hi-fi system introduced in selected locations in the latter half of last year. Here is a press release. I've had my Streamium for about 3 months and I really love it, but it is not everything that I thought it would be. For those of you who are thinking of getting one, you need to know the truth about it. The following paragraphs consist mostly of my complaints. If you want a more general and/or lovey-dovey review click here." UVWarning addresses below the unit's performance with various music sources, and has some words about Philips's tech support.

Internet Streams After logging into myPhilips.com with a web browser and adjusting your account settings, the Streamium will be able to connect to myPhilips.com and from there access any radio stations that you have configured. Unfortunately Philips seems to be keeping tight control on which internet radio stations customers can access. Not only are the number of stations relatively limited, but some of them you have to pay for. A couple of months ago, Philip's online FAQ stated, in response to whether or not users can select their own radio stations that are not listed on Philips website, that (and this is the exact quote) "Future software update release will cater for this feature." Now they have changed it to say that "In the future it will be possible to have different online music services accessed via myPhilips.com" So what are they saying? That they will simply have a larger selection available, but will not allow you to select your own? That's a bit annoying, but then I can't really see them being able to charge for premium services and allow users to access any station they want to.

PC Streams The PC-Link feature allows you to stream MP3s from any PC on your LAN. Unfortunately PC-Link software is not only proprietary, but it only runs on Windows and it requires you to download the trial version of MusicMatch Jukebox. This is obviously very inconvenient for a non-Windows user and what I find to be even more annoying than that, is that in addition to their browser requirements on myPhilips.com, there is an OS requirement. You can only access myPhilips.com if you are running Windows or MacOS -- Try it, I'm not kidding! I want to strangle whoever the webmaster of that website is. I have to reboot into my Windows partition every time I want to change some setting on my account.

CDs MP3 CDs / MP3-Pro CDs / CD-Rs / CD-RWs are all supported, however it doesn't seem to like any of the CD-Rs that I burn. They seem to work fine in other players, but when I stick any of them into my streamium, it gets confused and won't eject the CD unless I unplug the power cord and plug it back in (the power button doesn't work in this situation). CD-RWs surprisingly work just fine.

Tech Support When I couldn't get the PC-Link feature to work, I called tech support. Needless to say they were no help. This is a new product to them and I don't think they are used to dealing with software type issues. They kept telling me to unplug and plug all of the cables. Whatever... Later on I figured out on my own that it was because my AT&T Global Network Client that I was using for work had installed a permanent software firewall that I did not know about and so I disabled it and everything was peachy.

Other
FYI Here are some other internet audio appliances:

• Kerbango (3Com's dead linux-based Internet Radio Appliance)
  
• Audiotron (Turtle Beach/PC streams)
  
• Simplefi (Motorola/Wireless/Internet or PC streams)

Comments

Continue to love the AudioTtron

[EReidJ]

I continue to love my AudioTron. I now have three of them, two of them hooked up wired, one of them wirelessly with the help of a Linksys bridge. And they all play music that's stored on three different computers (we live in a group house).

Don't settle for these Internet appliances that try to prevent you from doing certain things or sharing your music the way you want to. Go with something more open!

All I want is...

[bahwi]

I want is a little Cappuccino PC with WiFi(54MBps, please), a TV-OUT(RCA preferably) and something to hook it up to my speakers(Again, RCA preferably). Oh, and NFS support. Then I want to use a pre-programmed (or program one myself) interface, hook it up to the X10 remote(the silver bullet I think they call it, one of their nice ones, err, their only nice one), and be done with it.

That way, I can watch MPEGs, AVI, and whatever else Mplayer supports. I can listen to my MP3's, My OGG's, and whatever else. I can get on my computer and add favorite streams to the box. That way I can listen to Absolute Pitch downstairs, every Sunday. That way I can listen to other streams. I need Real Audio on it so I can listen to NPR every now and then. Hell, set up Hourly News as a favorite button or something. That'd be nice.

That's all I really want for Christmas.

hackable?

[platypus]

Seeing philips fscking around with this premiums services thingy, and taking a quick look at their faq, I found:

Q: What if I have a firewall?

A: For streaming content from the Internet; the standard HTTP port 80 is used, so make sure that this port is open for outgoing traffic (there should be no problem if you can access the web from your PC). Although for business networks you may need you LAN administrator to help you with settings.

Shouldn't it be relativly easy set up a fake server/transparent proxy and/or doing a kind of man-in-the-middle attack to make your own "premium" service? I mean, it doesn't sound like it's encrypted on the transport layer?

Re:Good features

[Zathrus]

Audiotron keeps tempting me, since they're pretty open with the support, keep upgrading it, and what not. But there's a couple things that stop me dead -

Lack of OGG or FLAC support. And TB has stated that the current Audiotron won't have it either, because it doesn't have the CPU power. Yeah, I know someone has a plugin to convert any format to WAV on-the-fly, but it requires more CPU power than would be present in my network server(s). Realistically, I'm most interested in FLAC.

The second issue, which I'm not sure is still an issue, is that I've heard that the AT has a small "silence" between tracks... not an issue for some music, but for albums like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon there are segways between songs. It's such a trivial issue to properly buffer the data I'm amazed that this problem exists... does it still?

One thing I'd like, but isn't a "must have" is an on screen interface. It'd just be nice.

Who knows, I may buy one eventually anyway, but the limited format support (even though it's better than most of their competitors) irks me.

You can do it if you want!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello,

I also got a Streamium since early December. I've won it. Yes, out of the box the limitations you list are true, but you can bypass most of them, if you want.

Just hack it, of course ! :)

I am in the process of creating a nice application in Java which automates these tasks but its not ready yet (and I can't handle a slashdot effect on my 1024/256 connection)

If you want to listen to other stations do this:

- enable live365.com in myPhilips.com. (mp3.com is not streaming, it downloads mp3s from downloads.mp3.com if you sniff the ethernet connection - but live365.com is)
- install if you don't already have a caching-only DNS server within your lan. I use Bind8 on Linux
- configure your Streamium to use that DNS server. Either manually or via DHCP (I also use DHCP internally in my net)
- reconfigure your DNS and make yourself a primary zone for live365.com. Redirect www.live365.com to your nice Apache server (or whatever webserver you control)
- reconfigure your Webserver so it accepts requests for "www.live365.com"
- configure your Apache webserver that each access is relayed to a perl skript (could be PHP, too)
You can use this line:
ScriptAliasMatch ^/play/(.*) /usr/local/httpd/streamium/cgi-bin/streamium.pl

So any URL on your www.live365.com Webserver which has URI /play/ will be redirected to the script you denote.
- have a script that sends a HTTP redirection response back. You can use this example

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

#print "HTTP/1.0 302 found\r\n";
print "Server: Apache\r\n";
print "Location: http://213.73.255.244:8000\r\n";
print "Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
print "\r\n";

This will redirect it to the DI-Radio Trance stream for example.

- now test that stuff with a local webbrowser and if it works, start your Streamium, press Connect, wait a bit, select live365.com and then chose any stream you like, you'll be redirected to your chosen shout-/ice-cast stream as given in the Webserver's script.

Have fun!

As for musicmatch, yeah that sucks too. I have sniffed the communication protocol and am reverse-engeneering that too. Its quite simle actually. I'm not yet there and it will take a couple of weeks until I can finish that, but there too I will create a Java program which will give the same functionality but on every platform where java is available.

Just ask google for it in some weeks, when I've done it I'll release that stuff.

Also note that the communication Streamium Philips is encrypted, but the Stream-data is not, so you can redirect and manipulate at your will, provided you have a little homenetwork infrastructure (Linux/Unix Gateway where all Internet traffic passes through) where you can do whatever you like.

HTH for now.