Day 15 - Media Streaming

Yesterday we looked at the media capabilities of playing content stored on the Galaxy Tab but you may not always want to access local content, it maybe stored on a server or NAS appliance within your network. I found that the Galaxy Tab straight out of the box was very good with media but very poor at streaming media. There are no native applications which will allow you to access remotely stored content. Google's Music service is not available in the UK so I am unable to upload music to their servers and then stream it back. This is necessarily a problem as the Android Market is full of handy apps to help you out. I have tried out a few of these and am going to mention the ones that worked well and the ones I lost patience with.

I'll start of looking at an app which I thought would solve all my problems but the results were a bit out of sorts. UPnPlay is a small app which is designed to allow you to play music (video only supported by using extra plugins) from your DLNA or UPNP media server on your network, in my case this is a Netgear Stora. 

UPnPlay

The main interface screen is clear and easy to use but the problems I had were with navigation into the media server. It seamed to struggle with finding the music and then populating the artists lists, it would only ever seem to find 6 artists. Now I tend to prefer navigation through folders as opposed to by Artist and Track information from the ID3 tags in the files but UPnPlay didn't seem to want to show the folders. All of these problems may have been down to me and my setup but I must admit I gave up and moved on.

Another app I have tried was the very popular BubbleUPnP, this is the only app that I tried that has an interface designed for Honeycomb (although it is in beta). As you can see from the screenshot the interface makes much better use of the increased screen size and the tabbed style allows you to easily switch between the Now Playing, Library and other tabs.

BubbleUPnP

This is probably the best app I tested but what annoyed me slightly was the fact that you download it as a free download and then when you fire it up for the first time it says it will expire after 30 days and you will need to pay to continue using it past that date. Now I don't have a problem with paid apps and I understand that developers need to make their products pay (if their doing it for a living), but surely they could just put this in the market as a paid app and not masquerading as a free one. That aside if you do a lot of streaming from your local media server than this maybe a good app for you to pay for an use.

My final selection, which is the one that I have continued to use, is a free app called 2Player. This is designed to not only allow you to play content from your DLNA media server to your tablet but also to allow you to forward the music to any other Windows 7 PC or Xbox 360 on your network. It doesn't look great on the bigger screen of the Galaxy Tab but it does still work well.

2Player

As with all the other players you can select from the list and add it to a playlist or immediately play it on your local device. Its basic but works well.

All these apps build on the already excellent media credentials of the Galaxy Tab but it doesn't have the same system integration as you would find with say the iPad 2 with iTunes. If your looking for a tablet just for music then an iPad will be high on your list but I would say don't forget the Galaxy Tab. I will be looking at on tablet purchasing of music in the coming days, so stick with me.