[MLUG - DISCUSSION] home multimedia networking

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I thought quite a few of you would be interested in the article below so I 
am posting it here.  I have been realizing that I can store MP3s on a 
server and then play them from any other PC in the house.  This is working 
well for me.  I can use a laptop and a small pair of speakers to add a 
mini stereo wherever I want it using wireless networking.  For video I'm 
mostly sticking with TiVo and DVD player on my TV set.  The TiVo is 
increasingly frustrating because I feel more and more like I ought to be 
able to pull out the video files and use them in other ways - e.g., store 
on DVDs.  They are starting to lag way behind current technology.  --Mike

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/technology/04basics.html

N.Y. Times
January 4, 2007

Basics

Pulling It All Together

By DAMON DARLIN

WILLIAM D. WATKINS has seven terabytes of data storage tucked into a 
cabinet in the media room of his beach home in Aptos, Calif. That is not a 
big thing for Mr. Watkins, the chief executive of Seagate, which makes 
hard disk drives. But it is enough space to hold 600,000 songs, 584,000 
photographs and 1,000 hours of TV shows.

All of that material can be displayed on the giant flat-panel TV spread 
across one wall in the media room and distributed to the six TVs and 
numerous speakers throughout the house.

Call it tech envy, but I wondered if I could set up a system on a wireless 
home network so my own photos, videos and movies could be viewed from any 
TV in the house, and an entire collection of music could be summoned from 
any stereo. Could I do it with equipment available at a big chain like 
Best Buy or Circuit City?

"The answer to that is easy: no," said Dan Sokol, a technology analyst 
with the Envisioneering Group, electronic engineering consultants in 
Seaford, N.Y. The problem, according to Mr. Sokol, is that there are 
dozens of pieces of incompatible electronic equipment involved in this 
kind of project.

I refused to take Mr. Sokol's "no" for an answer -- and set out to build a 
home media network for less than $1,000. I understood there would be 
plenty of hurdles. Devices coming out of the world of information 
technology, like PCs and networking equipment, are just beginning to 
communicate with the devices that come out of the world of home 
electronics, like TVs and stereos.

Both industries have been working out standards through an alphabet soup 
of trade associations. They are hoping that all of those devices, and 
cellphones, printers and digital cameras, will start making sense to each 
other this year. Best Buy just started selling a whole system in a box 
that will handle entertainment and control your thermostats and lights for 
$15,000.

Device manufacturers are convinced that consumers will want 
interconnectivity. Parks Associates, a technology industry consulting 
firm, estimates that by 2010, some 30 million American homes will have a 
home entertainment network. (Right now only about half of the 43 million 
American homes with broadband Internet connections even have a home 
network, so this seems like an optimistic projection.)

"Connected entertainment is near and dear to our heart," said Jan-Luc 
Blakborn, director of digital entertainment at Hewlett-Packard. "We 
clearly see connected entertainment as an area where we can grow. It is 
starting to happen."

At present I can buy a Sonos or Squeezebox device to play music throughout 
the house -- but those can only handle music. Another device, the 
Slingbox, can send TV programs to a PC anywhere in the world over the 
Internet. But I do not want to watch TV on a 15-inch notebook screen when 
I can watch it on a 42-inch TV.

Then there is TiVo. It had the potential to become the leading home 
entertainment hub. A free download of TiVo Desktop software to a PC allows 
video from your TiVo to be watched anywhere and anytime on that PC. If you 
have a second TV, any program recorded on one TiVo box can stream 
effortlessly to any other TiVo elsewhere in the house.

But this is really an example of a lost opportunity. TiVo stores video in 
a proprietary digital format that prevents it from being viewed on 
non-TiVo devices, and the files are not recognized by other hardware, 
which is the problem that led Mr. Sokol to declare that my efforts would 
be futile.

James Denney, vice president for product marketing at TiVo, said the 
company had not set out to be the center of everything. "Our approach is 
that there isn't one hub in the house," he said. "Our role is a display 
device near the TV."

TiVo also does nothing for my collection of DVDs. It is difficult to watch 
a movie on DVD over a home network without first copying it to a hard 
drive. Software for doing this is widely available, but it is illegal to 
bypass the copy protection on a DVD, even one that you own. Systems for 
sending copy-protected video around the house are still largely works in 
progress.

Another problem I encountered was a lack of advice. Few of the devices 
needed to assemble my network are even advertised by retailers or 
manufacturers. Sony, for instance, has a number of devices under the 
LocationFree name that can be used to move TV shows to a PlayStation 
Portable game machine or a small TV monitor outdoors, but it seems to be 
keeping this a secret. Hewlett-Packard is selling what it calls the 
MediaSmart TV, a 37-inch L.C.D. set that locates your wireless home 
network and pulls in content. It is a nice product, but it will not work 
for this project; it costs $2,000.

To build a homemade networked entertainment system, I needed a network, of 
course. Older wireless routers using the 802.11b standard will move video 
data so slowly that it will be nearly unwatchable. So the wireless router 
has to be upgraded to 802.11g or the even newer 802.11n standard.

Here is where this project started getting expensive. Wireless devices 
anywhere on the network that are still using the older technology will 
slow the whole network. I have to upgrade them, too, for about $50 each.

Music, movies and photos can be stored on the hard drive of any computer 
connected to the network. But because TV shows or movies can fill up a 
PC's hard drive much faster than photos or music files do, it can make 
sense to centralize everything on an always-available external hard drive.

"The way I view it, being a nerd, the storage device is as important as 
the media center," said Mike Scott, technical media manager at D-Link, a 
maker of home networking equipment.

There are now drives on the market that can hold as much as a terabyte, 
enough space to hold about 90 hours of high-definition TV.  That much 
storage will cost a bit more than $500, but prices keep falling.

I decided to use a kind of external hard drive known as a network-attached 
storage device. Although they cost about $100 more than regular drives, 
they come with software that will organize files and help all the devices 
on the network find the drive. The Maxtor Shared Storage II drive that I 
chose, which holds 1 terabyte and costs about $680, was up and running in 
less than 10 minutes.

One alternative is buy a $100 device called a network storage link that is 
plugged in between a regular external drive and the router. That offers 
more flexibility if I buy a lower-capacity drive that needs to be upgraded 
later.

The next step is attaching a media adapter to a TV or a stereo to pick up 
the programming from the network. D-Link sells one called the MediaLounge 
Media Player for less than $300. (A fancier model just hit the market for 
$600.) This is essentially a DVD player with a built-in wireless adapter 
that enables it to locate photos, movies and music on the network's hard 
drives. A similar device from D-Link, which costs about $180, can connect 
to any stereo receiver so that music files are always accessible. The 
drawback is that I needed one of these adapters for every TV and stereo.

The home entertainment network that I jury-rigged wasn't nearly as slick 
as Mr. Watkins's setup. But then it only cost me about $850, not including 
the cost of my existing computers and TV. I spent more time moving music 
and video files to the hard drive than I spent actually setting it up. 
Once the content was there, I could do exactly what I wanted to do: view 
whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted.

If all of this sounds like too much effort, you can always wait. Almost 
every consumer electronics company is set to announce its answer to home 
entertainment connectivity at the Consumer Electronics Show next week. As 
with all consumer electronics, the devices coming out next year will do 
more for less. I can only hope they will be just a little bit easier to 
put together.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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