1. Talk about cheap.



Major Downside to pay for a product? They charge money for goods and services? HOW DARE THEY!!!



Why don't you just pony up the couple of bucks to own the program?



I'd rather help out a small company by shelling out the mere $25 than know I am cheating hard working people of out money. But that's me. If the program works (which it does) and you are getting use out of it, pay for it. Last time I checked these programs aren't created with magic.



That said, I had a hard time getting the program set up the first time, as the user interface could use some work. But once you figure it out it works like a charm, definitely worth the money. I was thinking of buying a small usb drive to play my music but then this program came out and was cheaper and works a thousand times better. I love having access to all of my iTunes playlists.

Posted at 2:32PM on Jan 4th 2006 by Art Guy

2. I use this and rarely buy shareware but I thought "hey i gotta if I want to stream photos and music' seriosuly someimtes you just gotta not be a tight ass. They accept paypal whch is what I used anf forum pages help to set it up.



Warning: the demo is as buggy as hell though and rarely works well the version you pay for works fine and much better than the demo. Plus once you buy it you can download it and its your forever and you can do what u want with it.

Posted at 2:35PM on Jan 4th 2006 by Daniel D

3. What about Movies? mainly avi, mpgs... huh huh... comon what do I care about streaming photos, maybe mp3s but hell I don't even have a 360 so...

Posted at 8:07PM on Jan 4th 2006 by todd

4. Here's a tutorial i wrote on the net for how to auto-boot the TwonkyMedia trial. I've had my free trial running for 2 consecutive days. Enjoy!



This is a working FREE solution for you linux users out there. The best alternative for Windows Media connect for linux is to download TwonkyVision's TwonkyMedia trial and make a loop script to execute the server before it's been auto-shut off.



Here's how it works. First of all, if the executable "twonkymedia-trial" doesn't receive a WORKDIR=/dir/name flag, it builds the content in the current directory. It builds the database (twonkymedia-db directory and contents) and the config HTML file and the ini when twonkymedia-trial is executed. So here's where it gets fun:



First, let's make a directory where everything will live:

mkdir /etc/twonkymedia



Now, extract the contents of the twonkymedia trial zip to /etc/twonkymedia. Once you've done that, go to that directory:

cd /etc/twonkymedia



and create a new file called trick_twonky.sh

nano trick_twonky.sh



Now edit this file as follows:

#!/bin/bash

while [ 1 ]

do

/etc/twonkymedia/twonkymedia-trial &

sleep 1380

killall twonkymedia-trial

sleep 15

done



save the file (CTRL+X, y, [ENTER])



Then run the script you just made:

. trick_twonky.sh &



For those of you that didn't catch on to what's happening, we've just created a script that first of all executes the twonkymedia-trial executable to start the whole process. I figured out that the trial doesn't run for "30 minutes" but actuall konks out around 25 minutes. So our script sleeps for 23 minutes (1380 seconds) and then kills any mention of the twonkymedia-trial process, sleeps for 15 seconds, then starts all over again.



As far as i know, a terminal window has to remain open for this script to be persistent (i don't know how to do it otherwise) but it will continually shut down the twonkymedia server every 23 minutes (before it auto-shuts off) and turns it back on.



Of course, you could be more elaborate and change the while loop to check for the twonkymedia-trial service and if it's running, sleep. If not, run it. I had some problems with this though, creating duplicate mediaserver processes and thus screwing up the port number (9000, 9001, 9002, 9003, etc) each time.



Once you've got everything all set up, feel free to edit the configurations (localhost:9000) to your tastes and save your changes. It should remember your settings each time it's been shut down and turned back on and should auto-scan content directories each time it starts.



Have fun, kids!

Posted at 5:56PM on Jan 5th 2006 by Joe