Anuj Singhal’s blog

I was going through the internet searching for something new to do with my N95 and found something really interesting, you can read about it here . Although the concept of sharing media using WLAN is not new and UPnP has been around for sometime but it was very poorly implemented on the N95 in the earlier firmwares.  It seems that in the hype surrounding the inclusion of  on demand paging and NGage application in the v20 firmware for N95 we missed a very neat little improvement. Nokia has improved the UPnP interoperability so to say.... to understand what it means we must understand that the UPnP defines three types of devices:

• UPnP Servers - these store things like music, movies and pictures
• UPnP Renderers - these play music or display images/movies
• UPnP Control Points - these tell UPnP renderers what to play/display from which uPNP server

N95 could only act as a UPnP control point with earlier firmwares and used to have a PC software on the CD to be installed on the computer which used to act as a renderer. The N95 could play the media files on the PC after copying them to itself.

Now with V20 N95 has got both server and rendering abilities, that means you can actually stream media files through WLAN from your PC to the N95 and play them on the phone.

I personally use it with my laptop running windows XP and it works just fine. You will need to setup a home network first (or an ad-hoc network if you don't have a router) The detailed how to on setting up and ad-hoc network can be found here.

After the adhoc network is up and running, on your N95 go to Menu- tools - connectivity- Home media. This should automatically run a wizard on the first run, otherwise go to options and run the wizard. You should be able to setup the WLAN home media network. You can choose to share the media stored on the phone with the home network during the setup.
Now on the PC, run the windows media player (I use WMP 11), go to tools- options- library. You will see an option to configure sharing, click on it and you will be able to see an unknown device, select it and click allow (you can also configure what all media to share).

Now whenever you need to play media on the phone, goto home media and click browse home, it will show you PC listed there, on selecting it you'll see your shared media devided into music, video, pictures and playlists.

now the catch is when you want to play a song or say view a picture, you have to select it and then click options- click play and select on device. then wait till the file loads. It'll take  few moments, be patient and then it will play... you can control it just like the music player.
There option to copy your music onto the device too...you can also view the pictures stored on the PC.

I hope this helps most of you....this is my first blog so i hope you'll forgive the errors i might have made. Be free to leave your comments.