Review: QCast Tuner for PS2

Posted by pudge on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @07:55AM from the synergy-for-the-whole-family dept.

With TiVo's release of the much anticipated Home Media Option (anticipated by me, anyway), I renewed my quest to find a way to integrate my computer's media files with my TV. TiVo's solution is not an option for me, because I don't have a Series2, and even if I did, the TiVo solution doesn't work with DirecTV units (for now, anyway). So I looked into something I saw a few months ago on ThinkGeek: QCast Tuner for PlayStation 2. QCast Tuner is software that plays audio, video, and image files from your computer to your network adapter-equipped PS2. There are two pieces to the software, the PS2 DVD and the computer software (on a separate CD), for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. I used the Mac OS X version, of course. There's a configuration utility to set up what you will share, and to what users/IP addresses. Then a separate program launches the server, which serves up the files and playlists. It's all written in Java, which means the UI stinks, but it seems to work well.

It can handle many media formats; to me, the most important are MPEG-1, MP3, and JPEG. But it also handles DivX, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, Ogg Vorbis, and PNG, and can be updated to handle other formats. But it doesn't handle the majority of my movie file archive, which are QuickTime, and that's a shame. And if you try to open a file it can't read (I changed some .mov files to .mpg, as it filters by name), it seems to hang.

I got the PS2 Network Adapter installed first, popped it onto the back of the machine, and ran the setup disk to configure it. Then I played a game of Madden 2003 online. I scored a touchdown on a tight end slant on the first play, then got one more play at the end of the half (a 30-yard reception to Troy Brown), and then didn't take another snap. Stupid 1-minute quarters. I lost 14-7.

Then I remembered I had this QCast Tuner thing, and I installed it on my PowerBook G3/500, where I keep my images, my MP3s, and my EyeTV recordings. It didn't take much to set it up, same as with the initial setup: I manually entered my IP address, router address, etc. and the IP address of the PowerBook G3. The software on the PowerBook updated and configured the PS2 software, and restarted it, and I was ready to go.

From the main screen you can elect to view pictures, or play music and video. I tried music first, where I had shared my iTunes directory, which has one directory per artist (except for compilations, which are in a separate directory). I have 293 directories in this directory, and there is no good way to skip to the bottom of the list; you can go one screen at a time, but that takes a little while. So I picked Ben Folds to start out with.

The user interface, apart from not handling long lists well, has several usability problems. To go up a directory, you select the ".." directory, which is something that Unix geeks know, but most PS2 users would expect to use the triangle button or something.

You cannot play songs from these lists, either; you need to add them to the playlist, then hit L1 to switch to the playlist, and then play from there. To get the ID3 tags to show up, you have to hit L1 again, and select that option (along with the shuffle and repeat options). And if you leave the playing screens (which makes the music stop, so you can't manage playlists while playing music) and come back, those options get reset.

You cannot get the time remaining of a song, and the UI doesn't show the full track name -- or track number -- if it is too large for the available space (it has trouble even with track "1/10", though "1/9" fits). And you can't scan forward or backward in a song or movie (which is often the case with streaming software), you can only pause, play, stop, and skip to another file.

To make it easier to find what you want to play, you can make playlists. Select the files you want to play in the interface, and save the playlist, which is stored on the server. I didn't want to do this for all my MP3s, but I had an easier solution: I wrote a small Perl script to create symlinks to my MP3 artist directories in other directories beginning with the first letter of the artist; and I share that directory of directories of symlinks instead. So instead of going down a list of 390 artists to get to Wesley Willis, I just select W, and he's right there.

My problem with EyeTV was greater: as noted in my review of EyeTV, the filenames bear no resemblance to the contents of the files, unlike the MP3s. But the solution I wrote for EyeTV was easily modified to serve me here, too. The playlists are just text files with the path (relative to the share point) on one line, and just the filename on the next line.

I thought I could change the filename line to be any arbitrary text (like "McLaughlin Group 2003.04.11") and have one playlist for all my EyeTV recordings, but that didn't have any effect; the display still showed the filename. So instead, I created multiple playlists, one for each program. So the playlist "EyeTV: McLaughlin Group" has paths for each McLaughlin Group recording I've got saved. It would have been nice to have an EyeTV playlist directory, instead of naming the playlists "EyeTV: ", but I could find no way to make nested playlists. If a playlist is not in the root playlist directory, it is not recognized as a playlist.

I can now watch the shows I used to have to watch on the computer, on the TV. It makes me feel kinda dirty, like it should have been on the TV all along. Oh well. And any changes to my music and TV recordings are regularly updated, as the two programs run via cron every half hour (and I can even begin watching a program that is currently recording).

QCast is bitten by the iTunes ID3 comment bug whereby data is stored with a frame header of "COM ", which is illegal. So QCast doesn't recognize any of the ID3 tag at all. I can't blame QCast for Apple's bug, especially since it bit my code too; this was the final straw that made me convert all my tags to ID3v2.2.0 (only v2.3.0 and v2.4.0 are affected). Maybe the QCast people can fix that problem when they add QuickTime support (he says hopefully).

The final issue I have is how to integrate it into my TV "experience." I don't want to have to turn on the PS2 and wait for it to boot every time I want to listen to music, so do I leave it on whenever I am around? And my system isn't set up to easily switch between PS2 and TiVo and DVD; my switch box has no remote, but does switch to a device that is turned on, which is nice for DVDs, but useless for when you leave the PS2 on all the time. I could plug the PS2 into the spare inputs on the VCR (which is on a separate input to the amplifier, and has its own button on the remote control), but that is kinda sloppy. And do I buy an IR remote control for the PS2? Is there an IR remote that can turn the PS2 off and on? These are problems mostly inherent in the design of using PS2 for multimedia, and there's not a lot I can do except to try to figure out ways to do things that work for me.

Basically, QCast Tuner is a nice idea, and it works well despite its UI and design flaws (some of which can be fixed on subsequent updates, I imagine), if you can fit it into your setup (or change your setup to suit it). I'm still undecided on using it long-term, but I am going to keep trying it out for awhile and see how it goes.

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