Without doubt, the most significant news in wireless home networking —aside from the general price drops that are driving growth in the industry — is the movement of the 802.11-based networking outside the realm of computers and into the realm of entertainment.
The linkage of the two environments yields the best of both possible worlds. You can use your hard drive on your PC to store audio and video tracks for playback on your TV and through your stereo. You can stream movies from the Internet and play them on your TV. You can take pictures with your digital camera, load them on your PC, and view them on your TV. You get the picture (oops, pun).
You will simply not believe how much the ability to link the home entertainment center with the PC will affect your computing and entertainment experiences. It could affect which PC you buy. For example, if you’re buying a Windows PC, you may choose one that supports Microsoft’s Window’s Media Center functionality (part of the Windows Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate variants), designed to power your home entertainment system (it’s too irresistible). It could affect how you rent movies: Why go all the way to Blockbuster when you can just download a movie over the Internet from Movielink (www.movielink.com) with a single click? It could even affect how you watch your favorite shows because with computer-based personal video recorders (PVRs), you can record the shows you want to watch but always miss because you could never figure out how to record on the VCR. Whew. That’s some change.
In this topic, we expose you to some of the ways wireless home networking is enabling this revolution toward a linked TV/PC world. You will find that much of what we talk about throughout this topic serves as the perfect foundation for linking PCs and audio/video systems.
You may be thinking, "Whoa, wait a minute, I thought wireless was just for data. Are you telling me that I need to move my PC to my living room and put it next to my TV?" Rest assured: We’re not suggesting that, although you may find yourself putting a PC near your TV sometime soon. You could indeed put your PC next to your TV, link it with a video cable, and run your Internet interconnection to the living room. But, if that’s your only PC and your spouse wants to watch the latest basketball game, you may find it hard to do your work!
The revolution we’re talking about — and are just getting started with in this topic and the ones that follow — is the whole-home wireless revolution, where that powerful data network you install for your PCs to talk to one another and the Internet can also talk to lots of other things in your home. You hear us talk a great deal about your whole-home audio network or a whole-home video network. That’s our code for "you can hear (view) it throughout the house." You built that wireless network (in Part III), and now other devices will come and use it. And coming they are, indeed — by the boxful. Be prepared to hear about all these great devices — things you use every day, such as your stereo, refrigerator, and car — that want to hop onboard your wireless home highway.
Wirelessly Enabling Your Home Entertainment System
If you’re like most of us, your home entertainment system probably consists of a TV, a stereo receiver, some components (such as a record player, tape deck, or CD/DVD player), and a few speakers. For most parties, this setup is enough to make for a memorable evening!
And, if you’re like most of us, you have a jumble of wires linking all this audio/ visual (A/V) gear together. The mere thought of adding more wiring to the system — especially to link, for example, your receiver to your computer to play some MP3s — is a bit much.
We have some good news for you. Regardless of whether you have a $250 television set or a $25,000 home theater, you can wirelessly enable almost any type of A/V gear you have. Before we get into the specific options now on the market, we need to discuss at a high level the wireless bandwidth requirements for the two major applications for your entertainment system: audio and video.
Here are the two predominant ways that audio and video files are handled with your entertainment/PC combo:
Streaming: The file is accessed from your PC’s hard drive (or over the Internet) and sent via a continuous signal to your entertainment hardware for live playback. This is the way most media content is handled in home networks today.
File transfer: The file is sent from your PC to your stereo system components, where it’s stored for later playback.
These two applications have different effects on your wireless home network. Streaming applications are real-time applications (meaning that what you are hearing or seeing, or both, is what’s being streamed over the network right now), and any problems with the network, such as not having enough bandwidth to support the media you’re playing, has a noticeable effect in your playback experience (for example, dropped audio or blocky video). File transfers, on the other hand, can pretty much work over any network connection.
With file transfer, lots of transmissions take place in the background. For example, many audio programs allow for automatic synchronization between file repositories, which can be scheduled during off hours to minimize the effect on your network traffic when you’re using your home network. And, in these cases, you’re not as concerned with how long it takes as you would be if you were watching or listening to it live while it plays.
A streaming application is sensitive to network delays and lost data packets. You tend to notice a bad picture pretty quickly. Also, with a file transfer, any lost data can be retransmitted when its loss is detected. But with streaming video and audio, you need to get the packets right the first time because most of the transmission protocols don’t even allow for retransmission, even if you want to. You just get clipped and delayed sound, which sounds bad.
A good-quality 802.11g signal is fine in most instances for audio or video file transfers and is also more than adequate for audio streaming. Whether it’s okay for video streaming depends a great deal on how the video was encoded and the size of the file. The larger the file size for the same amount of running time, the larger the bandwidth that’s required to transmit it for steady video performance. Video is a bandwidth hog; whereas audio streaming might require a few hundred Kbps of bandwidth (or maybe one or two Mbps for uncompressed audio), video can require much more. Low-resolution Internet video (for example, YouTube videos) doesn’t require a lot of bandwidth; it also doesn’t look all that great on your TV. If you want to send DVD-quality video across your wireless network, you need several Mbps’s worth of wireless bandwidth to do so — HDTV can require as much as 20 Mbps.
The high bandwidth requirements of video were one of the driving forces behind the development of 802.11n. 802.11g may have a nominal bandwidth of 54 Mbps, but in the real world users can expect less than 20 Mbps of real throughput across the whole network. A single channel of HDTV would stop the entire network dead.
If you’re considering streaming high-quality video across your wireless network, you should definitely build an 802.11n network. Most wireless audio and video gear now available on the market is shipping with 802.11g on board, but a few vendors have begun selling 802.11n equipment. Again, remember, if you’re just doing audio streaming, 802.11g is more than adequate.
You can choose from a number of different options when you build a wireless entertainment network, including the following:
Media adapters: The most basic (but by no means unsophisticated) wireless media systems are known as media adapters. These devices have no storage themselves, so they are strictly for streaming media. A media adapter does exactly what its name says it does — it converts (or adapts) a streaming audio or video file coming from your computer (such as an MP3 music file) to an analog or digital audio (or video) format that your TV or audio equipment understands. A media adapter connects to your wireless network on the computer side using Wi-Fi, and connects to your home entertainment gear using standard audio and video cables. Examples of such gear include Logitech’s Squeezebox (www. slimdevices.com, shown in Figure 12-1) and Apple’s AirPort Express (www.apple.com).
Figure 12-1:
The Squeeze-Box digital media adapter is one of our favorites.
Media players/servers: Media players or servers add storage to the mix. Typically, these devices have a built-in hard drive that lets you locally store entertainment content for playback, so you don’t have to rely as much on the performance of your wireless network. Most media players also will stream content from your computer network (and the Internet), so you can think of them as a media adapter with a hard drive. Examples include Apple’s AppleTV (www.apple.com/appletv), and D-Link’s Media-Lounge players (such as the DSM-510, www.dlink.com/products/?sec= 0&pid=542).
There’s not a Ministry of Naming Esoteric Wireless Entertainment Gear out there (if there was, we think it would be right next door to the Ministry of Banning Common Household Items from Airplanes, but that’s another story entirely!). What we mean by this statement is that not all vendors use exactly the same terms we are using here to delineate the difference between an adapter and a player/server. The bottom line is that an adapter has no local storage and is a streaming-only device, whereas a player/server has a hard drive and can work independently of your PC’s hard drive (syncing the content and then playing it back whenever, even when your spouse has the laptop at work).
Media center extenders: A specialized category of media adapters/players, media center extenders work specifically with Windows XP or Vista computers running Microsoft’s Windows Media Center software. A media center extender essentially replicates the Media Center user interface on your TV and lets you access all the content stored on your Media Center PC remotely. A media center extender may have a hard drive for local content storage, but it is primarily a streaming solution, with the content you’re accessing all coming from your Media Center PC. Examples here include Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console,and the Linksys DMA 2100 Media Center Extender (www.linksys.com).
Networked audio/video gear: Some audio/video gear has the networking built right in. This could be a home theater receiver with networking capabilities that let you stream audio from your computer directly into the receiver (without requiring a stand-alone media adapter), or it could be a purpose-built wireless entertainment system that uses Wi-Fi to distribute audio (and to a lesser degree, video) around your home. A good example of the former is Denon’s AVR-4308CI home theater receiver, with built-in Wi-Fi (http://usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3494.asp); an example of the latter is the Sonos Digital Music System (www.sonos.com), which uses Wi-Fi to create a multiroom, whole-home audio distribution system.
Most networked home theater receivers do not have built-in Wi-Fi but instead provide only a wired Ethernet connection. You can use a Wi-Fi Ethernet bridge, discussed later in the topic, to connect these devices to your wireless network.
Home theater PCs: Finally, you can bring the content right to your home theater or media room by installing a home theater PC. These are purpose-built PCs designed to function as your home theater’s DVR (digital video recorder), DVD player, and general jack-of-all-trades content source.
In the following sections we take a deeper dive into these product categories and talk about how you can get audio and video onto your wireless network.
Almost all the entertainment networking equipment we discuss in this topic includes wired Ethernet connections in addition to Wi-Fi networking. So if your whole-home network consists of both wired and wireless network infrastructure, and the wired part of your network reaches your entertainment system, you can use Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi to connect your audio/video gear — we recommend that you do so if the cables are there!
When you shop for a wireless entertainment device of any sort, it’s important to make sure it’s certified not only for the variant of 802.11 you’re using (g or n), but also for the level of wireless networking security you’re using.Most new devices support all current Wi-Fi security standards (up to and including WPA2 Personal), but traditionally this category of product lagged behind computer networking products in terms of security. Remember that you can’t have a mix of WEP and WPA/WPA2 on the same network — we recommend walking away from a product that supports only WEP unless you’re comfortable reducing the security on your entire network.
Getting Media from Computers to A/V Equipment
The most common question we’re asked in the realm of wireless entertainment is, "How do I play the thousands of digital songs stored on my computer on the high-quality audio system in my family room?" The second most common question we’re asked is, "How do I take all of those videos on my computer and play them on my big-screen TV?"
Well these are questions we can answer. In fact, this entire topic is designed to answer those questions and variants thereof. But let’s start off with the simplest answer to these simple questions: get a digital media adapter (or player)!
If audio is your biggest concern (and for most folks it is), a digital media adapter can be an easy-to-configure and inexpensive route between point A (your computer) and point B (your A/V system). Adding video to the equation means you’ll have to spend a bit more money (and will probably benefit from the local storage contained in a digital media player instead of an adapter).
Cutting the cord in your home theater
This topic focuses on the wireless equipment used to distribute audio (or video) from one part of your home to another — for example, taking music from your PC to a stereo in another room. Another place where we are starting to see wireless systems become an option is in the home theater. Home theaters are great (we wrote Home Theaters For topic because we love them so much), but they’re also a lot of work — getting the wires around the room for five to seven surround-sound speakers and a flat panel TV on the wall is not always easy. To date, wireless speakers have not always been as good (in terms of sound performance) as wired speakers, and most systems required a mix of wired (in front) and wireless speakers (in the back of the room). At the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, a company called Neosonik
(www.neosonik.com) announced a new wireless home theater solution that provides wireless connections for all five speakers and a wireless video connection for an HDTV.
A number of other companies announced wireless HDMI(high definition multimedia interface) solutions that replace the digital video cables used to connect HDTVs to source components such as cable or satellite TV set-top boxes. If you have a flat-panel TV (plasma or LCD) on the wall, or a projection system mounted to your ceiling, the last thing you want to do is deal with hiding the cables that bring the picture into your TV system. With these wireless HDMI systems — from vendors such as Belkin (www.belkin.com) and Gefen (www.gefen.com)—you can go wire free and still enjoy a full-quality HDTV picture!
What should you look for when choosing a media adapter or player? We think the following things are important:
Network compatibility and performance: Any media adapter or player you choose should be Wi-Fi certified and support at least 802.11g. If you’re choosing a system that supports video as well, we strongly recommend that you choose an 802.11n system. You may also consider choosing a system certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance to support the WMM quality of service standard. See the sidebar titled "Understanding Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM)" for more on this. Finally, you should ensure that your adapter or player supports the Wi-Fi security system you’re using on your network. (We recommend that you use WPA2.)
Even if your requirements are for audio only, if your AP or wireless router uses 802.11n, you should choose an 802.11n media player or adapter simply because mixing 802.11g and 802.11n on the same network decreases the overall speed of the network. Keep your network all n to maximize throughput for any use of the network.
Software requirements: Most media adapters and players require the installation of software on your PC or Mac. This software acts like Windows Media Player or iTunes does on your computer, and indexes all the media on your computer and streams (or forwards) it to your adapter or player. Some media adapters or players actually use iTunes and Windows Media Player (which you probably already have installed on your PC), which simplifies matters greatly.
User interface: The user interface is simply the mechanism that you use to control your media player. For some simple media adapters (such as Apple’s multipurpose AirPort Express — which can also be used as a router or as a print server), the interface is back on your computer (so you have to use the software on the computer to control the media adapter, which isn’t convenient). Other adapters and players have a simple remote control that lets you skip forward and back through songs or video programs, pause, and stop and start the program.
Display: Your media player or adapter’s display is part of its user interface, but we’re mentioning it separately simply because not all media adapters and players even have a display — which is inconvenient to say the least. For media adapters and players that do have a display, you’ll find two distinct mechanisms:
• LCD/LED screens on the device itself: Many media players or adapters have a small text display on the device, which can display your playlists, the title or song name currently playing, and more. Keep in mind that you don’t want this display to be too small, because you’re likely to be trying to read it from across the room.
• TV onscreen displays: These are typical for media players and adapters that can handle video content. An onscreen menu (similar to the one that your cable or satellite set-top box offers) lets you view (and browse through) all your PC-based media on the big screen. An onscreen display is sexy and a lot easier to use from across the room than a smaller screen on the device itself, but an onscreen display does require you to have your TV turned on, even when you’re only listening to music — so you might consider a player/adapter that offers both an onscreen display and a built-in display.
An adapter without a screen isn’t necessarily completely inconvenient.With Apple’s FrontRow software (included on all current Macs), he can even use a remote control to control his music playback.
File format support: You can use a number of file formats for storing audio and video on a computer. Examples in the audio world include MP3, WMA (Windows Media Audio), and AAC (used by iTunes). The video world includes formats such as WMV (Windows Media Video), MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. Most media adapters and players support the most common file formats (particularly widely used standards such as MP3 and MPEG), but you should pay close attention to the formats you actually use to make sure that your adapter or player matches up with them.
DRM support: DRM (or digital rights management) is a blanket term to describe various copy protection and usage restriction systems used by online music and video stores to control how customers use music and videos that they download or purchase. DRM is, at its essence, an effort to keep digital music and video downloads off the Internet and off file-sharing services (such as peer-to-peer networks). Unfortunately for consumers, most DRM is overly restrictive and makes it hard to distribute your purchased music and video not only to strangers over the Internet but also to yourself over your home network. If a lot of the music and video that you have on your computers is from an online store, check carefully to see whether your media adapter or player can support the variant of DRM that the store uses — oftentimes the answer is no. We talk more about this in the section titled "Internet Content for Your Media Adapters, Players, and HTPCs" at the end of this topic.
Support for Internet Services: Although most music and video obtained online is downloaded to a PC and stored there for future playback, some online services support a streaming model (often called a subscription service). With these services (an example is Rhapsody, www.rhapsody.com), you don’t actually own a song or album, but you can access any of millions of songs on demand (as long as your subscription is current). Some media adapters and players allow you to directly access these services, so you can completely bypass your computer and listen to (or watch) this online content through your wireless network and broadband Internet connection.
In addition to subscription services such as Rhapsody, hundreds of Internet radio stations play their own chosen music playlists (like traditional radio stations). You can’t choose which songs to listen to with Internet radio (like you can with a subscription service), but you don’t have to pay anything either. Many media adapters and players can tune into Internet radio stations — without requiring you to use your computer to tune in.
Outputs: Remember again that media adapters and players are designed to sit in between your computer(s) and your audio/video gear and to covert digital music and video files into a format that your A/V gear can understand. To connect your adapter or player to that A/V gear, you’ll need to use some standard audio/video cables. As a baseline, you should expect your adapter/player to have a stereo pair of analog audio outputs (RCA cables, just like the ones that connect DVD players, tape decks, and the like). More advanced models have digital audio outputs (TOSLINK or coaxial) for connecting to a home theater receiver. On the video side, at a minimum you should have a composite video connection (the yellow video cable found on VCRs). If you want to get a high-definition picture from your adapter or player, you should expect to find either a set of analog component video outputs (three cables, like the ones found on many DVD players) or an HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) digital video connector. (HDMI can actually carry both video and digital audio on one cable.)
Understanding Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM)
Another 802.11 standard (man, there sure are a lot of them) that you might occasionally hear about (if you’re reading up on 802.11 technologies online) is called 802.11e. 802.11e is a quality of service (or QoS) enhancement to other 802.11 technologies (a, b, g, or n) — 802.11e can determine when bandwidth- or delay-sensitive traffic is moving across your network , and it can then prioritize that traffic over things such as e-mail to keep your e-mail download from making your video signal break up on your TV.
The Wi-Fi Alliance folks have created, as they did with just about all the other 802.11 standards, a certification program for 802.11e-capable equipment called WMM (or Wi-Fi Multimedia). WMM-certified equipment incorporates the QoS mechanisms defined in 802.11e and additionally has been certified to work across vendors. If you want WMM to work for your Wi-Fi entertainment gear, you need to be sure that both the entertainment device itself (for example, a digital media adapter) and your access point or wireless router are certified for WMM. (The box will have the WMM logo.)
Overall, WMM can help improve your multimedia experience within your wireless network; one thing that it can’t do, however, is control the QoS of your Internet connection. So if your audio or video network is being affected by traffic inside your home network, WMM can help — if the bottleneck is in your Internet connection (for example, someone downloading a big file while you’re trying to watch streaming video from the Internet), WMM won’t be of any assistance.
Choosing Networked Entertainment Gear
The digital media adapters and players we discuss in the preceding section make a connection between your computer network and traditional (non-networked) A/V gear. Not all A/V gear is incapable of being networked though. In fact, a growing number of home theater receivers and even televisions are being outfitted with network capabilities. Most networked A/V gear (be it a receiver or a TV) simply incorporates a digital media adapter (or the functionality of one) into the device itself — providing you with the ability to access digital media files across your home network. Almost all these network-enabled receivers and TVs are Ethernet devices and not Wi-Fi enabled. Later in this section, we tell you how to connect Ethernet entertainment gear to your wireless network.
You can also find whole-home wireless audio distribution systems that can connect to your computers, but that also can be self-contained wireless entertainment systems. We talk about both types of systems in this section.
Adding Wi-Fi to Ethernet A/V gear
In the future, we expect that most networked entertainment gear will have built-in Wi-Fi. And in fact, several high-end receivers and TVs do have built-in Wi-Fi today. (An example of this is Denon’s AVR-4308CI receiver, which costs $2,500 and includes built-in 802.11g networking.) Manufacturers have been reluctant to incorporate Wi-Fi due to the rapid pace of technological change (802.11b being replaced by 802.11g, which is now being replaced by 802.11n). Rather than be caught with outdated wireless technology, many manufacturers have skipped wireless entirely.
Unfortunately for us as consumers, nothing is worse than having a great piece of entertainment gear that you want to get onto your home network, but the nearest outlet is yards away and you don’t have a cable long enough to plug it in.
To get this gear on your net, you need a wireless bridge. A popular model is the D-Link (www.d-link.com, $89) DWL-G820 Wireless Ethernet Bridge (802.11g) that comes with Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA2) and 128-bit WEP security. On the back is a simple Ethernet port that enables you to bring any networkable device onto your wireless backbone. Another popular product is the 802.11g Apple Airport Express (www.apple.com, $99), which is a great little multipurpose device that is a media adapter, a wireless Ethernet bridge, a travel router, an access point, and a print server all in one slick white package. (It can’t do all these things at once, but it can be configured for any of these uses.) Oh, and it can play music purchased at the iTunes store (and it supports WPA2).
Other Ethernet bridge products include the Linksys WET-54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge (www.linksys.com, $89.99) and the Belkin F5D7330 802.11g Wireless Ethernet Bridge and Game Adapter (www.belkin.com, $100).
All the wireless bridges we mention here are 802.11g and not 802.11n. That’s the case simply because, as we write, 802.11n is still a new technology and most vendors have only gotten around to releasing 802.11n access points, wireless routers, and network adapter cards. We fully expect to see 802.11n variants of the wireless bridges discussed in the two previous topics to be released in early 2008 — likely by the time you read this.
Here are a couple of tips for buying wireless bridges:
Buy at least 802.11g for this application. You need the bandwidth, and 802.11n will be an even better choice, when it becomes available. Video doesn’t work well at 802.11b speeds, so if you see an older 802.11b product of this sort on eBay, resist the urge to buy it.
Make sure the security matches your network security needs. All the wireless bridges we’ve mentioned in this topic support WPA/WPA2 security on the network, but other products on the market don’t. Remember that security in a wireless network is a least-common-denominator concept — if even one of your devices supports only WEP and not WPA, your entire network will run using the (not-so-secure) WEP security system.
Equipment with built-in Wi-Fi
Some manufacturers are building whole-home wireless entertainment systems (typically focused on music-only applications) that let you set up a centralized, remotely controlled multiroom audio system without wires or complicated installations. Essentially, you can use Wi-Fi to get a whole-home audio system like the really rich folks have in their mansions with $200,000 custom-installed wiring systems. (Wireless) power to the people!
We focus on a leading-edge wireless media server product, the Sonos Music System (www.sonos.com, about $900 for a two-room system), as shown in Figure 12-2. This technogeek’s dream system consists of a controller (the brains of the system), a "zone" player (the endpoints of the system where all the speaker and system interfaces are housed, as well as a four-port switch so that you can network other items in the vicinity — nice!), and matching speakers you can use if you want everything to match.
Figure 12-2:
The Sonos Music System is advanced stuff!
Most buyers of the Sonos also buy a local Network Attached Storage (NAS) hard drive because the Sonos itself doesn’t have one — a non-NAS system just plays music found elsewhere, such as on your PC. You can also have more than one Sonos zone player; the players talk to each other and the controller in a meshlike fashion, so if you have a really long house, you can still use the Sonos system. In such instances, the Sonos system synchronizes the music so that it all plays at the same time, avoiding any weird echo-type sounds around the house. Sonos uses 802.11g for its wireless protocol — and creates its own mesh network hopping from Sonos to Sonos throughout your home.
If you want to connect your Sonos system to your existing wireless network (and to your Internet connection, for playing back Internet radio stations), you can add in the $99 Sonos Zonebridge, which plugs into an Ethernet port on your home router and automatically bridges your PC and Sonos wireless networks.
Putting a Networked PC in Your Home Theater
When you talk about your home entertainment center, you often talk about sources: that is, devices such as tape decks, AM/FM receivers, phono players, CD units, DVD players, and other consumer electronics devices that provide the inputs of the content you listen to and watch through your entertainment system.
When you think about adding your networked PC or PCs to your entertainment mix, the PC becomes just another high-quality source device attached to your A/V system — albeit wirelessly. To connect your PC to your entertainment system, you must have some special audio/video cards and corresponding software to enable your PC to "speak stereo." When the PC is configured like this, you effectively have a home theater PC (or HTPC, as the cool kids refer to them). In fact, if you do it right, you can create an HTPC that funnels audio and video into your system at a higher-quality level than many moderately priced, stand-alone source components. HTPC can be that good.
You can either buy a ready-to-go HTPC right off the shelf or build one yourself. We don’t recommend that you build an HTPC unless you have a fair amount of knowledge about PCs. If that’s the case, have at it. Another obvious point: It’s much easier to buy a ready-to-go version of an HTPC off the shelf.
What you expect from your home theater PC is quite different from what David Bowie might expect from his HTPC. Regardless of your needs, however, a home theater PC should be able to store music and video files, play CDs and DVDs, let you play video games on the big screen, and tune in to online music and video content. Thus, it needs ample hard drive space and the appropriate software (see the following section). Also, your HTPC acts as a DVR (see the nearby sidebar, "Checking out PC DVRs," for the lowdown on PC-based DVRs). In addition, an HTPC can Store audio (music) files: Now you can easily play your MP3s anywhere on your wireless network.
Store video clips: Keeping your digital home video tapes handy is quite the crowd pleaser — you can have your own America’s Funniest Home Videos show.
Play CDs and DVDs: The ability to play DVDs is essential in a home theater environment.
Act as a DVR (digital video recorder): This optional (but almost essential, we think) function uses the HTPC’s hard drive to record television shows like a TiVo (www.tivo.com).
Let you play video games on the big screen: With the right hardware, PCs are sometimes even better than gaming .
Tune in to online music and video content: Grab the good stuff off the Internet (yes, and pay for it), and then enjoy it on the big screen with good audio equipment.
Provide a high-quality, progressive video signal to your TV video display: This is behind-the-curtain stuff. Simply, an HTPC uses special hardware to display your PC’s video content on a TV. Sure, PCs have built-in video systems, but most are designed to be displayed only on PC monitors, not on TVs. To get the highest possible video quality on your big-screen HDTV, you need a special video card that can produce a high-definition, progressive-scan video signal. (This investment also gives you better performance on your PC’s monitor, which is never bad.)
Decode and send HDTV content to your high-definition TV display:
HTPCs can provide a cheap way to decode over-the-air HDTV signals and send them to your home entertainment center’s display. You just need the right hardware (an HDTV-capable video card and a TV tuner card). If you have HDTV, this is a cool optional feature of HTPC.
For example, the HP z560 Digital Entertainment Center (www.hp.com, $1,799) is a full-fledged digital media center PC with onboard 802.11g functionality and includes Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition or Windows Vista Home Premium (which also includes Media Center software). From regular and high-definition TV broadcasts to movies, music, games, and digital photos, this baby has it all, and you can connect to it wirelessly. What more could you want? Note that this current model does not have built-in 802.11n networking — we expect that by the time you read this, HP will have updated the networking to include 802.11n.
The term Media Center PC is often used generically, but it can mean two different things: a PC configured to be a repository and driver for media applications or a PC sold with the Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition or Windows Vista Home Premium software on board. You can get this software only by buying a new, specially configured Media Center PC. Not all Media Center PCs have the Windows Media Center Edition software, so read the fine print.
If you have a Windows XP or Vista Media Center PC, you will probably want to link it to other TVs, using a Media Center Extender. An example is Linksys DMA 2200 Media Center Extender with DVD player (price unknown as we write). This sleek device works like a media adapter for a Media Center PC and allows you to view any media on the Media Center PC on a remote TV, including recorded (DVR) shows and even live TV programming being picked up by the TV tuner in the PC. The DMA 2200 uses 802.11n networking (so it will work with video wirelessly, unlike previous generations of these products), and comes with a built-in DVD player. Figure 12-3 shows the DMA 2200.
Checking out PC DVRs
Using the HTPC’s hard drive to record television shows like the way a TiVo does is an optional (but almost essential, we think) function. And using an HTPC as a DVR is a standard feature in a Windows XP/Vista Media Center PC — and something that we think you should consider adding to your home-built HTPC. Even if this were the only thing you wanted to do with your HTPC, it would be worth it. You can simply install a PC DVR kit and skip much of the other stuff (such as the DVD player, decoder, and software).
Tip: Because the biggest limitation to any DVR system is the amount of space on your hard drive for storing video, consider a hard drive upgrade regardless of your other HTPC intentions.
PC DVR kits on the market include the ATI TV Wonder 650 or 600 Series (http://ati.amd.com/ products/atitvwonder.html), SnapStream Beyond TV (www.snapstream.com), and Pinnacle PCTV (www.pinnaclesys.com).
Figure 12-3:
The DMA 2200 from Linksys will hook your Media Center PC to remote TVs.
Internet Content for Your Media Adapters, Players, and HTPCs
If you’re really into this HTPC thing, think about whether setting up an HTPC is worth the trouble just to play back DVDs (although the quality would be way high). Probably not, huh? "So," you may ask yourself, "what else is in it for me?" What makes an HTPC useful is its ability to provide a portal to all sorts of great Internet-based content — that is, music and video content. A portal is simply a one-stop shop for movies, songs, animation clips, and video voice mail. Think of it as a kind of Yahoo! for your audio and video needs. (In fact, Yahoo!, a portal itself, is trying to position itself to be just that! You can play great music videos from its Web site, at launch.yahoo.com.)
You’re not getting much Internet content if your HTPC isn’t connected to the Internet. And, don’t forget that a connection to your high-speed Internet access (DSL, fiber-optic, or cable modem) is part of the overall equation. (Yup, a regular ol’ vanilla dial-up connection works, but — we can’t stress this enough — not nearly as well. If you’re one of the 90 to 95 percent of the population who can get broadband, get it! If you’re out of range, we’re sorry, and recommend that you check out the satellite broadband services offered by folks such as DirecTV.)
Other wireless ways (where there’s a will . . . )
We are obviously biased toward the 802.11 technologies because we believe in a wireless home network backbone. We think that with all the focus on standards, costs will decrease, new features will evolve, and the overall capability will continue to get better. Collectively, it simply gives you more options for the home.
That doesn’t mean, however, that standards are the only way to go. Plenty of proprietary 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and 5 GHz approaches — as well as other frequency bands — are popular because they’re cheap to manufacture and cheap to implement. For example, check out the Audiovox Terk (www.audiovox.com, $99) Leapfrog Series Wireless A/V System (Model LF-30S, for example), which uses the same 2.4 GHz frequency spectrum as 802.11b and 802.11g to carry audio and video around the house. The gear we’ve tested in this space, like the X10 Entertainment Anywhere and various Radio Shack 900 MHz models, has been somewhat of a disappointment, but it does work.
So, 802.11 isn’t the only way, but we prefer it based on experience. Just remember: The more signals you put in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz ranges to compete with your 802.11 signals, the more problems you have. The 802.11 products are building in new quality-of-service capabilities designed to deal with multiple simultaneous audio and video transmissions, and over time will be more robust, accessible, and reliable, we think. Look for the Wi-Fi icon when you buy.
You’ve undoubtedly read about Hollywood’s drive to rid the Internet of peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, to halt the ripping (copying) of DVDs from rented DVD discs, and so on. For the rest of us, who have better things to focus on, a slew of great online music stores and services are legal, economical, and easy to use — you just have to try them.
You find three types of online music offerings:
Online music and video stores, such as Apple’s iTunes Store, where you download music to your PC or network-capable device. There are limits to what you can do with these songs after they’re downloaded, but generally you can play them anywhere on your network.
Online music subscription services, such as Rhapsody and Yahoo! Music, where you can play any songs available in their catalogs. These are streaming audio songs that you play as often as you like, wherever you want, as long as you have Internet access. For many of these services, if you want to play them off your PC, you need a media adapter or player designed for that service.
A combination of the preceding two items where you can play any songs you want during your subscription period and optionally download (and keep) songs for an extra fee.
Some of the most popular online music hangouts include
Apple iTunes Music Store (www.itunes.com) Real Network’s Rhapsody (www.rhapsody.com) Napster (newly relaunched at www.napster.com) eMusic (www.emusic.com) Yahoo! Music (music.yahoo.com)
Some sites require monthly fees to join, typically around $5 to $10 per month; others have their business model driven by download fees on a per song or per video basis.
Remember that most online services incorporate DRM (digital rights management) technologies in their downloaded files. If you want to play these files across your network, you need to ensure that your media adapter or player supports the DRM system of the content you’ve downloaded (or of the service you are subscribed to). Unfortunately, this can limit your choices, but it’s a sad fact of how the entertainment industry treats their customers these days. There are some (happy) exceptions, however. Apple’s iTunes Store offers a number of DRM-free song downloads, and eMusic and Amazon.com’s online music stores are free of DRM.
