The Quest for Mobile Media - Part 1

What do I mean by Mobile Media? In a nutshell I want to be able to access my movies, music, docs and the internet from anywhere. It shouldn't matter whether I am in my house, the backyard, the car or a hotel. I want it all and I want it conveniently.

This is a quest I have been working on for a few years now, on and off. In this series of posts I hope to document my journey in the hopes others like me will be helped.

My first exposure to the possibilities of mobile media was a few years ago with Tivo, MythTV and Windows Media Center. Tivo doesn't exactly fit in the same category, but they did have to capability to play shows on computers over the network.

At this point in time, I started to see the potential have storing movies centrally and playing them on any TV in the house. My main problem with Tivo/MythTV/MCE was the client interface. It was unacceptable to have a computer in each room. There was talk about MCE offering extenders and MythTV being able to be installed on small STB-like computers, but that really isn't what I had in mind.

So after fiddling with the above technologies, I was still without a solution. I forget how, but I stumbled upon GB-PVR. GB-PVR is a Windows/.NET based PVR (i.e. Tivo) application with a wide variety of support for TV cards. One thing that really stood out was that it supported the Media MVP.

The Media MVP is a small STB with a remote control. It has a built in 100Mbit Ethernet port and the newer versions even have built in 802.11G access. This was definitely something I could see putting in every room. GB-PVR would push the User interface out to each device, then stream the selected media, including live tv. When I was using this, they did not have the wireless MVP, so I used a wired version and a wireless bridge. The quality was not bad at all. The MediaMVP does not support High Definition as far as I know. GB-PVR does support it, so you would be able to watch it if your using it as a traditional PVR.

This concludes part 1, in the next part we will talk some more about GB-PVR and where that led to.