Nokia N80 IE and Asus WL-500G Premium UPnP
Both my new router and new mobile are UPnP-enabled devices and although I bought neither of them with UPnP in mind, I have been experimenting a bit. Partly because Pash - a visitor to this blog - left a comment about his UPnP results.
WL-500g Premium setup:
If the Media Server is enabled on the WL-500gP and you plug a USB drive into the router USB port assigned to the Media Server ("USB Application" -> "Basic Config"), the router will by itself create the necessary media folders and start sharing their content. That's at least what happened to me, when I plugged in an empty USB key. My WL-500gP is running Asus firmware, rev. 1.9.7.0.
The folder structure created is as follows:
-share
– \Download
– \Music
– \Photo
– \Video
N80 IE setup:
Set up UPnP by going to "Connect." -> "Home netw." -> "Settings" and choose the access point of your home network. To browse content on other UPnP servers, there is no need to share content on the phone, but if you wish to do so, sharing is set up in "Connect." -> "Home netw." -> "Content sharing"
Browse media from N80 IE:
Go to "Gallery" -> "Home network". The WL-500gP should show up here - default name is "WL500G.Premium" (see screenshot below). I think the media files residing on the WL-500gP USB drive should now be displayed, but nothing comes up.
To see if the problem is caused by the WL-500gP or the N80 IE, I went ahead and installed a trial version of On2Share Pro - a Windows UPnP media server and client (renderer). The On2Share client works as a plugin for Windows Media Player (WMP). Upon installation, WMP will look for UPnP servers and ask if media on found servers should be added to play lists.
The On2Share client had no problems locating and playing the media on the WL-500gP drive. I also shared some media files on the N80 IE and the On2Share client was able to play back these files without any problems.
I then used the On2Share server to host some media files on my laptop and as you can see in the screen shots1 below, the N80 IE had no problems locating the laptop server and listing its media files.
There is only one problem: the N80 IE cannot play back the media files on the laptop server - it can only redirect the playback to another UPnP device ("Gallery" -> "Home network" -> "Options" -> "Show via home net.").
A sort of conclusion
I did not get UPnP media sharing to work between the Asus WL-500g Premium router and my Nokia N80 Internet Edition mobile phone, but separately each device works with the On2Share server/client.
The N80 IE is not capable of playing back media on UPnP servers (which is what I really wanted to do: use the N80 as a sort of network media player)
I have no data on this, but while experimenting with the above I got the feeling that this UPnP stuff takes up quite a bit of network bandwidth.
- Taken using Antony Pranata's excellent Screenshot for Symbian OS [back]
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