media hive 0.8.7 review
Downloadmedia hive is a web-based playlist system, media catalog manager, and streaming content provider. With it, you can view your media
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media hive is a web-based playlist system, media catalog manager, and streaming content provider.
With it, you can view your media collection from anywhere using your favorite web browser, and play it with commonly-available media players such as Windows Media Player, XMMS, and many others.
If you are familiar with programs such as iTunes, WinAmp, and MusicMatch Jukebox, then you know the basics of what the hive can do from a catalog management perspective.
It differs in two important ways, however. First, it has a long list of features that make it powerful and fun to use. Also, it gives you access to your media files (mp3s, movies, TV shows) from any computer via a web-browser.
So, for example, if you connect a computer to your A/V system (stereo receiver if you're old-school), you can control your A/V system from any computer in the house. In fact, if you are connected to the internet you can control the hive from any computer you can sit yourself in front of.
And if you have a fast enough connection (DSL/cable or better), you can even listen to your music or watch your TV shows and movies from anywhere: a friend's house, work, your cell-phone (well, someday very soon)... anywhere.
The hive currently supports mp3-format audio and various flavors of video. The cataloging portion of the mhive system is fully extensible, allowing new parsers and media types to be developed externally and easily plugged into the system.
Audio encoding formats like FLAC, Ogg and AAC are possible... see the development section if you'd like to try your hand at creating them yourself.
The hive runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, and any other operating system that supports Java.
Here are some key features of "media hive":
Support for multiple media types
The hive can catalog and play a growing number of media types, thanks to its plug-in parser architecture, which makes it simple to add new ones. The hive currently comes with support for music, movies, audio books, and TV (via MythTV - if anyone with a TiVo wants to help make a parser for that, let me know).
A playlist system that is highly interactive and focuses on usability
You can modify the playlist at any time during playback. In addition to simple reordering, the playlist supports plug-in actions, allowing new features to be easily added. And playlists can be loaded and saved, of course.
Extensible stream handlers
These are configurable components that can modify the media stream prior to consumption by your media player. This can do many things - for example, it allows the hive to "downshift" both audio and video - meaning that it can subtly (or not-so-subtly, depending on your needs) lower the quality of the stream on-the-fly so you can listen to it over a slower network connection without permanently altering your media files.
"Play forever" mode
In this mode the playlist will select random entries from the catalog and play them continuously. This is not "random" mode - the playlist won't repeat until the catalog has been exhausted.
A skinnable web-based user interface
It's easy to create a new look-and-feel for the hive. Take a look at the development section for instructions on creating mhive skins. The practical application of this is that the hive can be used from a wide variety of devices - TV-based media centers, mobile phones, etc. Even better, the hive can look just the way you want.
Support for all the popular browsers
The skins supplied with the mhive system support most popular browsers, including IE (6.0+), Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari.
Multi-user capabilities
You can give anyone you like access to your media collection. Or not.
A powerful media catalog manager
Like the playlist aspect of the system, catalog navigation is streamlined and highly-usable. Hierarchical media types - mp3s for example, where an artist will contain multiple albums, and albums will contain multiple songs - are efficiently displayed and easy to navigate. This is subject to the design of the skin, of course - sometimes efficiency can be sacrificed for fun.
Support for all major operating systems
The mhive system is implemented in Java, allowing it to run any platform that has a Java Virtual Machine implementation.
A simple installation process
The hive does not have any external dependencies - not databases, not anything. For the layperson, this simply means that you can download it and run it without a complicated install, and without installing any other software. It can be removed by simply deleting its directory. And it doesn't install anything surreptitiously.
The ability to control your media player remotely
In normal mode the hive will run your media player when you press play. If you wish, you may instead have the hive to start a media player that resides on another computer. This is useful if you have multiple computers in your home that will control the hive. Another example would be using a mobile phone as a remote-control; you would want access to the catalog from the phone even though it won't be playing the media directly.
Location-based user-settings management
Settings can be "bound" to the IP address that the browser is connecting from, allowing individual physical locations to have unique settigns. The practical upshot of this is that you can configure skins on a per-location basis if you wish, allowing the TV in your media room to automatically use a skin that is easy to read, your desktop to use a skin that displays a lot of information, and your moble phone to use a skin that is designed just for it.
Requirements:
Java SDK 1.4 or greater
What's New in This Release:
This release adds a new Web interface that provides full visibility into the media hive's database.
It features a hover-based index, a point-and-click user rating mechanism, compound sorts, and flexible column layout.
It is compatible with Firefox, IE6, Safari, and Konqueror.
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