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

Common sense?

[The Bungi]

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

I can agree that this is crappy, but if you stand back a bit and look at things pragmatically, you'd understand that they're only catering to 99.9% of the desktop PC universe.

I really have no simpathy to rants like these because they are completely illogical.

Other than that, I appreciate your review. I've been thinking of getting a component for my home theater that does all this and it'll be helpful.

Re:Common sense?

[Anixamander]

I can agree that this is crappy, but if you stand back a bit and look at things pragmatically, you'd understand that they're only catering to 99.9% of the desktop PC universe.

I'm not sure if you're intentionally exaggerating Windows' installed base or if you are just ignorant, but the number certainly isn't 99.9%. Furthermore, as a review directed at Slashdotters, it is a very valid point...the number of users of systems other than Windows is higher here, so knowing that this product will not work with their system is crucial. Get over yourself...pointing out an important piece of info is hardly a "rant."

Re:Common sense?

[Helter]

As a review, this will serve to help many Slashdotters decide whether or not to purchase this equipment.

Don't you think that somebody running only linux would be a *LITTLE* peeved to purchase this product and find out that the reviewer had neglected to mention that it only works with windows?

The purpose of a review is not to change the world, or even the product. The purpose of a review is to provide the public with information about your experience using a product. Given that this was part of his experience, it is relevant and perfectly reasonable to include.

Good features

[ektor]

It seems the Streamium has lots of features however I'd bet the sound quality is quite mediocre, on par with a $199 mini-system.

I recommend the Audiotron. It plays streams over the internet, mp3s, wmas and can be totally configured and controlled over a web interface. More importantly it has a digital output so the quality is there (as long as your mp3s are good quality, of course).

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.

Open Source MP3 Devices

[ggalt]

Try the SliMP3 from Slim Devices (www.slimdevices.com). Server is open source and it runs on anything that will run Perl. I've had one for about two months and LOVE it!

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!

Wheres Ogg-Vorbis?

[Anonymous Coward]

No Ogg/Vorbis Support? *shakes head* to hell with it then! crap crap crap

SliMP3 works for me

[MrBlic]

After taking a look at these internet enabled radios, I decided to go for a simpler solution, I just received my SliMP3 from slim devices yesterday, and I am thrilled with it.

The beauty of the device is that it puts all the complexity in perl scripts on a server computer. I was afraid that I was going to have to upgrade the Debian Pentium I / 100MHz server in my basement, but it works just fine on it, rarely taking over %35 of CPU time.

So now, instead of running a long audio line from the stereo to my laptop, and starting winamp, I can hit play on the SliMP3 universal remote control. The audio quality is wonderful, and it is really easy to navigate my music collection. To listen to Groove Salad at SomaFM, I hit the menu button, then down to 'browse playlists' then right once to select it, then down two times 'till I see the 'Groove Salad Soma FM' entry, then hit the play button. By keying in letters using the numeric keypad on the control I can search too. I hit menu, down to 'search by song title', right, typed in 'mac' hit right, and chose 'Macerena' (a long forgotton MP3 in my collection) and hit play... it's too smooth.

Since the source is all open (GPL) Perl, people can modify it, and have. One available patch will show the BBC news ticker on the SliMP3s display. I want to have a php page on my web server send messages to it, so that people visiting my web site can send messages into my living room.

If the SliMP3 is a very simple audio decoder, I can't wait until there's a similar video decoder. I would throw my Tivo out the window, and record shows onto my Debian box's hard drive, and then inexpensively stream it to anywhere in the house.

The downside is that the SliMP3 isn't too much less expensive then a Tivo (after rebates) but it is the elegant way to go.

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.

Re:All I want is...

[merlin_jim]

VIA Eden my friend.

Built in TV-OUT (RCA & S-Video), Ethernet, and Line-out (converters to RCA available for ~ $5), as well as SPDIF if you don't need the RCA TV-OUT.

All available for ~ $100 w/proc. It's quiet. It's cheap. It's functional.

Throw in a couple old, otherwise useless, sticks of SDRAM... ditto on the P/S... build your own OS (it uses x86, so pick your favorite distro)... make it a seldom-write OS and put it on a compact flash card. Put a reader in it somewhere (you can get them inexpensively here)... presto chango, you have a completely solid-state computer that you paid < $200 for. It's got USB so if you want a WI-FI card, add it yourself. It even has internal headers for it so you don't have to have a dongle hanging outside your case.

FYI, I have one. I put a full hard drive in mine. Plus DVD player. Plus serial-port IR remote control receiver. Total cost was ~ $350, but a lot of the components have come down in price since then. I use Windows 98 SE with Media Player 9 and Real Networks One Player v.1 and it works great. The OS license was from an old computer that I've installed Linux on, so it was free. I even wrote a custom app to boot into in VB. It took about a day, and it lets me get to most of my common functionality easily, even when running in my car. It's also convenient (and snazzy) when I have friends over. Doesn't look like Windows, it looks like a high-end av component.

IIRC, Real Networks doesn't have a Linux driver and NFS doesn't have a Windows driver, so you may be SOL as far as compatibility on both of those counts... samba may be your answer. Or one of the unix compatibility toolkits for windows. Or if WINE is working well enough, that may be the way to go.

BTW, details and fun ideas about this form factor can be had at this link

If anyone is interested in my experiences or tips about this platform, feel free to e-mail me at the slashcode-guarded e-mail address listed above. I get lots of spam so if I don't answer within a couple days, try a resend.

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?

"Streamium?"

[tps12]

What marketing whiz came up with that name? Sounds like a good name for an adult diaper.

Streamium MC-/250 Betatest

[asv108]

I got an e-mail this morning about betatest for the latest version of this product call the MC-/250. You can apply for the betatest here.

There go my chances of being selected!

Browser identification

[trtmrt]

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.

You can just change your browser identification. I don't know what browser you usually use but I just tried with Phoenix (showing itself as Mozilla 1.0 on win98) and the login page worked (I don't know how the rest of the site behaves). Konqueror worked also.

Brana

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.