6. Turning on and Configuring the Player

Figure 8: Opening screen

Once the Media Server is running on your PC, you can turn on the Play@TV player box. Figure 8 shows you what you should see on your TV. By default the player will look for a DHCP address, but you can configure it for a static IP if you wish. In the wireless configuration menu, the player will scan for available networks and allow you to use WEP encryption.

Figure 9: Options menu

You can also go into the Options menu (Figure 9) to configure other settings such as Parental Locks and whether you want the image to be 4:3 or 16:9 (for all you lucky HDTV owners). Changing the view mode will make media show up in a list or as thumbnails.

Figure 10: Setting video quality

For the incoming video, you can set the bit rate from 1.5 Mbps to 6 Mbps (Figure 10). Obviously the higher the bit rate the better the video will look. How high you can go will be determined by your network speed and the power of your computer.