Google Pushes Media to Your TV
Google yesterday released Google Media Server, a tiny application that runs in the background on users’ desktops to send their media files as well as Picasa photos and YouTube video to a TV via a “universal plug-and-play” device like the PlayStation 3.
You’ll need Windows, Google Desktop, and a UPnP-enabled device (for instance, a HP or Loewe television, a Roku SoundBridge, an Archos portable media player, or a PlayStation 3) to try it out, so this does require some tinkering. However, Google Media Server won’t work for the XBox 360 because apparently to link it up, Google would have had to say its server was made by Microsoft (at least according to someone from the Media Server team commenting in their forum).
Alternatives include Orb and TVersity, but they don’t connect directly to YouTube and Picasa (Update: TVersity does connect to YouTube, per the comments). On the web streaming front, YouTube has also been upping its game to get onto living room devices.
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[...] Google pushes media to your TV [...]
Google verlinkt altes und neues Fernsehen…
— 1:49 AM on July 1, 2008
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The Google team are considering a Wii interface also at the moment the Wii wont work because it doesn’t support uPnP but it will work with a HTTP interface .
Interestingly the Wii browser recognizes the plugin from the browser but will throw a forbidden massage because the admin page can only be accessed from localhost.
FYI, here’s our guide to UPnP AV or DLNA goodness :) http://www.last100.com/2008/05/27/dlna-certified/
Just a small correction, TVersity does connect to YouTube.
Does anyone know how Youtube works on this Google Media Server Upnp thing? Is Google somehow providing access to the complete Youtube through somekind of interface, I thought Upnp was limited to lists of files and that it wouldn’t support special interfaces, search box, sorting orders, login and cookies and stuff like that. It would seem also that Google is then streaming the H264 480×360 resolution versions of all the videos since that is more compatible then the Flash7 320×240 versions. I wonder if by now Google has encoded all the videos in both formats or if the H264 library encodings are still in progress.
Ah, thanks Ronen. Sorry about that. Charbax, I’m interested in that question too…maybe Ronen knows more?