In article , Richard
Kimber
wrote:
On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 15:06:06 +0100, Jim Lesurf wrote:


On a completely different matter, I note that you put streamers in
quotes. I've always thought that using a dlna server was 'streaming'
and that doing anything else was 'playing'. Am I right that there's
been a takeover of the term 'streaming' by the wider community that
does not use dlna? IMHO Software players 'play'. But, then, nowadays,
nothing seems to matter :-)

I confess I've become quite confused by the ways people have started to use
the terms 'streamer' and 'streaming'. I have the feeling that hifi mags,
etc have started using the terms for more than one thing without making a
distinction.

I use the old fashioned approach that I have something like a set of wave
or flac files stored on a device, and then a program 'plays' a file. I
don't think of that as 'streaming' even if the data is being fetched from
one machine as a program on another is playing it. Or if it is being played
from a NAS.

I *suspect* the key distinction is that I'm using a computer to run a
program to play a file and then send the output to a DAC. Whereas
'streamer' may be a device that isn't a general purpose computer. But a
device that provides its own user interface, and reads files for itself,
playing them out via its own DAC.

For me the advantage of the 'run you chosen software on your chosen
computer' is flexibility. e,g, On the PandaBoard I'm writing this email
using, I wrote my own simple wave file player to play wave files out to a
USB DAC. Yesterday I was playing a wave file I have on a NAS that way,
using SunFish and NFS. Is this 'streaming'? At present I wouldn't say it
was. But I may be conditioned by the *nix 'everything is a file' mindset.
:-)

But I'd be interested to see what definitions/distinctions others give of
this. TBH I'm not even clear what the details of things like dlna *are*
except beyond assuming they require some standards so the device can find
and identify what it can play.

The above has files in mind. Whereas 'streaming' could be applied to
situations where the source is 'stream' in the sense that there is no
predefined 'file' of a set size, name, etc. But a sequence of data from a
chosen source address.

Comments?

Jim

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