I recently bought a blu-ray player that had net streaming functions. This means it can play Youtube, blip.tv, podcasts, etc. if you have it connected to the net. It can do this by ethernet cable or by a USB wifi dongle. Unfortunately, the wifi dongle costs about $80-$90, which I think is not good value when the same thing for PCs cost about $20-$50. The next best thing is to use the ethernet socket.
I considered a Home Plug but those are expensive. A bridging router would work too. Fortunately, I already have a home theatre PC (HTPC) running Windows 7 sitting next to the TV. The HTPC has both wireless (USB) and wired network adapters. It uses the wireless one to connect to the LAN. I decided to connect the blu-ray player and the HTPC via their ethernet ports.
I initially tried using the Internet Connection Sharing feature of Windows 7, hence the title. I’m supposed to go to the Properties of the wireless network adapter of my HTPC, click on the Sharing tab and enable the Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection option. However, my blu-ray player still could not get access to the internet this way.
What did work was bridging. I select both my wireless and wired adapters in the Network Connections window, right-click and select Bridge Connections. The blu-ray player can now see the net, albeit only when the HTPC is also turned on. Oh well, beggars can’t be choosers. A bridging router could still be on the cards to remove this dependency on the HTPC.
Yes, of course, I can just use the HTPC for streaming internet media, but for the less technically savvy people in the household, the blu-ray player may be the better option. One thing I have noticed is that the blu-ray player does not cache data. Maybe I can run a caching proxy on the HTPC. I hope it will work with the bridging setup that I have.
Tags: bridging, internet, networking, streaming, Windows
