So far in this multi-part post, we have talked about audio sources. Now we are going to talk about video sources. Please note that in our industry, when we say ‘video source’, we are generally including audio in that too, as almost all video sources output both audio and video.
OK… let’s continue.
Satellite / Cable Set-top Box: The satellite or cable boxes are a must-have for most users. The question is, do you really want a box in every room with every display and pay the additional monthly fee for each box, and then select inputs to switch between that box and other sources you have in the room, or would you rather centralize your boxes so that you can share them in any room that you wish. Distributed video comes with a price, but offers tremendous convenience. However, if you have displays (TVs) in many rooms around your home, you may not have an option as you will not want to purchase a Blu-ray player, a set top box and a movie box for each room.
In my case, I chose to install a distributed/multi-room video/audio system. It made no sense to me whatsoever, to install and then pay for 11 Satellite boxes for my eleven displays, when most of the time there are only three of us using the system. OK… I know… it sounds like a lot of TVs, but obviously we don’t watch them all at the same time; even on Super Bowl Day. And even when the kids are home on break, and relatives are visiting, we would never watch 11 different programs at one time. That is why I went with “User Centric” design instead of ‘Room Centric” design. In a user centric design, you only have as many boxes as users or the maximum different programs that you would watch at one time. For some of you, this number may be lower or higher. I wanted the convenience of having a display wherever we would possibly want to watch TV or a movie. My layout worked out as follows: Family Room, Living Room, Theater, Game Room, Master Bedroom, Master Bath, Master Shower, Guest Room, (2) Kids Rooms, and the Garage.
DVR: The Digital Video Recorder (DVR), also known as Personal Video Recorder (PVR), is now a main stream source. This is even available from your cable/satellite providers. With as busy as our lives have become, it is not a wonder why this source rose to the top and satellite/cable companies integrated the technology with their set top boxes so quickly. Pure and simple, for many it is the best thing since ketchup to be able to record and store TV programs to watch at another time, skip past commercials when we watch it later, or pause a program while we answer the door or phone, or someone needs our undivided attention.
Blu-ray DVD Player: Not since CDs replaced cassettes, had audio/video technology made such a huge leap forward in performance. Going to high definition displays didn’t do it because without the high definition sources, what good were they? It is, after all, all about the sources.
Although we had a temporary war between two formats (Blu-ray and HD-DVD), Blu-ray became the clear winner in early 2008. The key here is that studios are now behind ‘one standard’ and can deliver a new movie experience to us, which not only substantially improves the video quality, but the audio quality as well. This technology will pave the road to many more improvements and increased number of audio channels in the future.
A part of Blu-ray that most have not experienced yet, and the studios have yet to use to their advantage, is the side of the standard that allows the studios to store games on the same DVD, more content such as interviews, voting – which then links to Internet databases, purchases of things that you see in a movie, including outfits or products, interactivity with the movie like changing camera angles, and even giving the movie watchers the option to select how a movie ends. Some of these features can already be seen today, but only in a selected number of movies. A lot more will come.
But don’t get stuck on 1080p too fast, because this is only the beginning. The fact is that 1080p is on the lower half of where the high definition standard has been designed to take us. Your Blu-ray players are no longer different from your computer, in that if you want to stay current, you will need a software upgrade, which most people yet don’t do.
Something that most consumers haven’t noticed yet is that our Blu-ray players are more like our PCs now. I bought the first Blu-ray player available in the market – a Samsung BD-P1000. Since then, I have had to upgrade this player's firmware several times. Since this player does not have an Ethernet connection to the Internet, I have to download the firmware to my PC, burn it onto a DVD in an ISO format, put it in the player and then follow the onscreen instructions. A couple of times I had to upgrade the player’s firmware just to be able to play a particular Blu-ray movie that it would not play otherwise. Each time, good improvements were achieved even with the quality of the video.
I then bought a Sony Blu-ray BDP-S1 player, and although the upgrades are about the same, I really enjoy the rich feature set of the Sony Blu-ray player and picture is phenominal. This player too has required several upgrades and it too has shown great improvement with each upgrade; especially with movie startup speeds. Recently I purchased Sony's latest player, the S550, and I love it. Upgrading this player will be much easier because it has an Ethernet connection to the Internet. This new Sony Blu-ray player was resonably priced and offers several improvements over Sony's previous models. One very noticeable improvement was the startup speed of the player and movies. It also contains onboard storage for some of the downloadable movie bonuses offered by the studios for some of the movies.
Streaming Movie Players: Not too long ago, we were all dazzled by the number of movies that we could select from at Blockbuster, Hollywood Video or a video store of choice. Then came the movie-by-mail providers such as Netflix. After I experienced receiving the movies that I ordered in about two days, and for less money per movie, I was hooked and became a subscriber, paying a monthly fee.
But step aside movie-by-mail and video stores. There is a new contender in town – ‘Streaming Movie Players’. The big benefits of streaming movie players are selection and convenience. In most cases it is immediate and you don’t have to drive anywhere. With the cost of gas today, if you spend a gallon of gas to go pick up a movie rental, you are potentially paying up to $6.00 for the total price of that movie. And that doesn’t even include the cost of wear-and-tear on your car. That is more expensive than renting the movie from a streaming movie provider, which can cost you anywhere from $0.49 - $5.99 per movie. Another big benefit of streaming movie boxes is that at least one company is already offering over 10,000 titles.
For people that only watch a movie once or twice and can’t justify the price of a DVD, or don’t care to have the best audio/video performance available because 85% of Blu-ray quality is good enough, or for those that want to expand their movie options, this is the video source for you. Over the last couple of years, several companies offered their movie boxes to market. Some of these offerings have already failed and gone, while others are just now surfacing or making announcements about their upcoming boxes. Netflix subscribers can not only order DVD movies, but can also stream them and watch them right on their PCs. And if you have a Netflix movie box, they can stream them to that box too and watch them on their TV.
Because streaming movie boxes are such a new and interesting source, and because there are so many differences between the boxes currently available, I thought I would cover this in more details in an upcoming blog post, so before you go out and buy a movie box, read my next post, as I am testing these boxes side-by-side.
Home Theater PCs: A Home Theater PC is a great source for enthusiasts, but I do not recommend it for the non-techno user or the faint of heart. It is, after all, an entertainment PC, which integrates a computer with built in applications and hardware for DVD playback, music server, picture server, home control and more. Some home theater PCs are sold as ‘ready-made’ units so that all you do is configure it, and go. Their interfaces are a lot more graphical than what is typically found on consumer electronics and there is enough eye candy to satisfy everyone.
The problem that I see for the average, nontechnical consumer is that this type of source requires constant upgrades, just like your PCs and software applications do, if you want to stay current on features and functionality. However, if manufactures were to automate this, this could become a more compelling source. So far, this has not been the case, in spite of the promise.
Enthusiasts prefer a Home Theater PC as a source because they can build it one component at a time, deciding where to invest their money and what features and performance they want. I plan on building a Home Theater PC, possibly next year, just to go through the experience. When I do so, I will blog about my experience and the pros and cons of the Home Theater PC versus the equipment I have today.
Herman Cárdenas
If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, or if you have any comments or questions, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you: hermansblog@netstreams.com
Thursday, October 09, 2008
It’s All About the Sources (Part One)
So what problem are homeowners trying to solve when they invest thousands of dollars in audio/video systems for their homes? Whether we initially know it or not, we are trying to achieve the convenience of having every audio/video source that we have, available to us in most rooms in the house. This requires the distribution of the audio/video signals and their control, to multiple locations. So, you see? It really is all about the sources.
For many, achieving this with simplicity is the priority. For others, having the highest performance is the highest priority. The good news is that, as discussed in my previous blog post, those two objectives are no longer mutually exclusive. IP technology now allows us to achieve the best of both worlds. The focus of this post, however, will be on the sources themselves, and mostly I will talk about the sources that I have personally experienced over the last few years. Since I anticipated that this blog post would be a little long, I broke it out into a couple of different posts for easier reading and digesting.
AM /FM Tuners: Even though this is the least used source now-a-days, every multi-room system should include this basic source; if for nothing else than to stay in touch with the world if you were to ever lose your TV services. It’s also a ‘must have’ source if you enjoy talk radio.
iPod Docking Station: One of the new and coolest sources available is an iPod docking station. My favorite is made by a Sonance company called iPort, who pioneered the in-wall iPod docking station, although they do also make a desktop iPod docking station as well. Kids especially, love this source because they or their friends can drop in a personal iPod, or now iPhone, and listen to their music in all rooms or in any room in the house. Although this is a very convenient audio source, you must recognize that this source will not provide you the best audio quality available for your chosen music, for two reasons: a) the player itself only outputs analog audio at this time, and b) the music stored in your iPod/iPhone is typically heavily compressed (MP-3 or AAC) and not capable of delivering the experience you get when listening to the music directly from the CD, which stores the audio in an uncompressed audio format – WAV. However, it is a very cool source.
Music Server: Music servers are for users that have, or plan to have, a large collection of CDs and they want a very simple and realizable way of ripping their CDs, storing them, organizing them, selecting them and finally playing their favorite music. Some of the music servers offer a rich user interface focused on offering you the best in selection process and meta-data (songs, artists, genre, playlist, composer, and more) available. These servers come with one or multiple outputs, but when used with NetStreams IP-based DigiLinX system, we are able to extract up to 6 simultaneous, digital streams from the top servers in the market. This is the same as having six music servers that six different users can manipulate.
Internet Radio: Internet Radio has been around for a while, especially for those of us that are a little techno geeky, but it hadn’t become main stream because it was difficult to use at first, there were no standards, stations were changing and moving locations too fast, and you could only listen to Internet Radio on a computer. Most of this has changed now. Although this emerging industry still lacks a unified standard, there is a lot of convergence going on, and this source is becoming easier to use. More importantly, Internet Radio is no longer exclusive to computers. Many music server companies have now integrated Internet Radio with their music servers and more are working on the same. A few companies have rolled out a standalone Internet Radio that looks and behaves more like a consumer electronic product.
Networked Attached Storage (NAS): For the slightly or advanced techno savvy users, or for those that are PC centric, networked attached storage has become a real option as prices have dropped to a point that for under $900, you can now store more music in WAV (uncompressed) than most people will ever own in their lifetime. Of course you know that this will be under $500 by this time next year. Networked attached storage gives you redundancy is also not limited to music. It can store pictures, movies and your computer data files too.
I personally own a 2TB Buffalo NAS, which I recently paid $800 for. It is very small, about the size of a toaster. Two years ago I bought a 1TB LaCie NAS and that one cost me $1,500, and was so big that it almost did not fit in my equipment rack. Depending on which multi-room audio system you use, your installer will integrate your NAS in different ways.
With my DigiLinX system, I used a product that NetStreams makes called “Streaming Music Manager (SMM)”, which basically proxies up to 6 different streams of music, and their meta-data and control, and makes it available to any number of rooms that the user selects. The SMM not only discovers my music stored in the NAS device, but if I wish, it can also auto discover music available on any computer or other storage devices on my computer network. It simply aggregates all of the music into one list for our users to select from. To store the music into our NAS device, I simply set ‘Media Player’ and ‘iTunes’, to point to the NAS device for all storage. Make sure to also set it to store in the WAV format.
This is a very cool way to rip, store and play your music indeed, but for those that don’t have any computer experience or want to see and select from the richest meta-data available, I would recommend that you consider a music server instead. If you are interested in a music server, I recommend that you look at the Naim Audio and Qsonix servers, which I hope to test soon and blogging about. You might also want to look at Escient and Audio ReQuest. All of the above integrate with DigiLinX. Naim Audio servers actually have NetStreams technology built in and can stream directly to any StreamNet enabled IP speaker or IP amplifier.
Herman Cárdenas
If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, or if you have any comments or questions, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you: hermansblog@netstreams.com
For many, achieving this with simplicity is the priority. For others, having the highest performance is the highest priority. The good news is that, as discussed in my previous blog post, those two objectives are no longer mutually exclusive. IP technology now allows us to achieve the best of both worlds. The focus of this post, however, will be on the sources themselves, and mostly I will talk about the sources that I have personally experienced over the last few years. Since I anticipated that this blog post would be a little long, I broke it out into a couple of different posts for easier reading and digesting.
AM /FM Tuners: Even though this is the least used source now-a-days, every multi-room system should include this basic source; if for nothing else than to stay in touch with the world if you were to ever lose your TV services. It’s also a ‘must have’ source if you enjoy talk radio.
iPod Docking Station: One of the new and coolest sources available is an iPod docking station. My favorite is made by a Sonance company called iPort, who pioneered the in-wall iPod docking station, although they do also make a desktop iPod docking station as well. Kids especially, love this source because they or their friends can drop in a personal iPod, or now iPhone, and listen to their music in all rooms or in any room in the house. Although this is a very convenient audio source, you must recognize that this source will not provide you the best audio quality available for your chosen music, for two reasons: a) the player itself only outputs analog audio at this time, and b) the music stored in your iPod/iPhone is typically heavily compressed (MP-3 or AAC) and not capable of delivering the experience you get when listening to the music directly from the CD, which stores the audio in an uncompressed audio format – WAV. However, it is a very cool source.
Music Server: Music servers are for users that have, or plan to have, a large collection of CDs and they want a very simple and realizable way of ripping their CDs, storing them, organizing them, selecting them and finally playing their favorite music. Some of the music servers offer a rich user interface focused on offering you the best in selection process and meta-data (songs, artists, genre, playlist, composer, and more) available. These servers come with one or multiple outputs, but when used with NetStreams IP-based DigiLinX system, we are able to extract up to 6 simultaneous, digital streams from the top servers in the market. This is the same as having six music servers that six different users can manipulate.
Internet Radio: Internet Radio has been around for a while, especially for those of us that are a little techno geeky, but it hadn’t become main stream because it was difficult to use at first, there were no standards, stations were changing and moving locations too fast, and you could only listen to Internet Radio on a computer. Most of this has changed now. Although this emerging industry still lacks a unified standard, there is a lot of convergence going on, and this source is becoming easier to use. More importantly, Internet Radio is no longer exclusive to computers. Many music server companies have now integrated Internet Radio with their music servers and more are working on the same. A few companies have rolled out a standalone Internet Radio that looks and behaves more like a consumer electronic product.
Networked Attached Storage (NAS): For the slightly or advanced techno savvy users, or for those that are PC centric, networked attached storage has become a real option as prices have dropped to a point that for under $900, you can now store more music in WAV (uncompressed) than most people will ever own in their lifetime. Of course you know that this will be under $500 by this time next year. Networked attached storage gives you redundancy is also not limited to music. It can store pictures, movies and your computer data files too.
I personally own a 2TB Buffalo NAS, which I recently paid $800 for. It is very small, about the size of a toaster. Two years ago I bought a 1TB LaCie NAS and that one cost me $1,500, and was so big that it almost did not fit in my equipment rack. Depending on which multi-room audio system you use, your installer will integrate your NAS in different ways.
With my DigiLinX system, I used a product that NetStreams makes called “Streaming Music Manager (SMM)”, which basically proxies up to 6 different streams of music, and their meta-data and control, and makes it available to any number of rooms that the user selects. The SMM not only discovers my music stored in the NAS device, but if I wish, it can also auto discover music available on any computer or other storage devices on my computer network. It simply aggregates all of the music into one list for our users to select from. To store the music into our NAS device, I simply set ‘Media Player’ and ‘iTunes’, to point to the NAS device for all storage. Make sure to also set it to store in the WAV format.
This is a very cool way to rip, store and play your music indeed, but for those that don’t have any computer experience or want to see and select from the richest meta-data available, I would recommend that you consider a music server instead. If you are interested in a music server, I recommend that you look at the Naim Audio and Qsonix servers, which I hope to test soon and blogging about. You might also want to look at Escient and Audio ReQuest. All of the above integrate with DigiLinX. Naim Audio servers actually have NetStreams technology built in and can stream directly to any StreamNet enabled IP speaker or IP amplifier.
Herman Cárdenas
If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, or if you have any comments or questions, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you: hermansblog@netstreams.com
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