The Netstreams IP A/V Blog

My Top 3 Movie Boxes (Part Two)

2008-12-01T01:50:00.011-06:00

APPLE TV is the most recognized brand of the current movie boxes available today, but for some movie lovers, this box may not necessarily be the best option. The nice thing about Apple TV is that if you are an iTunes user, you already know how to use this box as it uses iTunes to manage your content.

From your television you can now enjoy your music, videos, movies, and pictures stored on your computers (PCs or MACs) or music, movies, and TV programming purchased on-the-fly from the Apple Store. To set this up, you simply follow the steps provided by their menu wizard, which walks you through the configuration so that your Apple TV box has a connection to content on your computers or from the Apple Store. After that, you will be able to access any PC stored music, videos, movies and pictures, to view them via your Apple TV, on the connected TV or projector. Setup was really a breeze.

The Apple TV is very small and has awesome onscreen eye-candy, which makes the selection of movies and music an even more entertaining experience. It outputs Composite Video, S-video and analog and digital audio, and for your more discrete movie watchers, Component Video, HDMI audio/video, and Digital Audio. Its video resolutions go up to 1080i for HD and the quality is good. Control is accomplished through their IR remote, which ships with the product. It’s remote control is very small, so one problem is losing it between the sofa cushions. It is very easy to use, just like an iPod. You can also control it though third-party remote controls. I control my Apple TV box via my NetStreams graphic user interface on my wireless controller or touch screens, using IR commands learned from its remote control.

One unique feature of the Apple TV box is that it lets you pick from, and watch, your favorite YouTube videos too; although I will say that when watching these videos on a display greater than 21”, the picture is not so hot and sometimes terrible. The reason for this is the low resolution that the videos are stored in on the Internet. The small file size is great for storage and retrieval online, but offers a less-than-desirable watching experience on displays larger than your computer monitor. In any case, it is a fun feature.

Although this is a very nice product, my big issues with the Apple TV box are: 1) that they only currently offer 1,000 movies for rent or purchase; far behind its competitors. I am not sure why this is, but Apple needs to put the pedal-to-the-metal and at least catch up to its competitors. And 2) that even though they claim to offer HD movies, which you pay more for, the best movie quality I experienced is equivalent to an up-converted Standard Definition DVD, and not a high definition equivalent anywhere near the quality of a Blu-ray movie, as VUDU offers.

Movie prices range from $0.99 to $4.99, TV programs are $1.99, and to rent the entire season varies from $9.99 to $34.99. The list price for the Apple TV box is $229 for their 40GB version and $329 for the 160GB. Apple charges no monthly fees.

VUDU is a great movie box and my favorite of all of the boxes offered in the market today. Like the Apple TV, the VUDU box is compact and can be installed just about anywhere. It is a fairly small box, just like the Apple TV. Its remote control is the best design I have seen to-date; very sexy design indeed. It is designed with the curves of a Porsche and fits nicely in the palm of your hand. A thumb wheel lets you fly around the interface and selections very fast. Aside from the thumb wheel, there are only three other buttons on the remote control, so it makes it super easy to use.

One of the pros of the VUDU remote is that it is RF (radio frequency), which means that if your VUDU box is located inside of a cabinet, it is not a problem. No line-of-sight is needed and it has a very fast response, allowing you to fly through selections faster than you can read them. The con of the VUDU RF remote is that the commands cannot be learned by a universal remote control, because it does not output IR (infrared). There is now an option though, and that is to buy the optional IR dongle from VUDU. In my opinion, this was a major oversight and IR should have been built-into the box, along with its RF, which was a great idea. I control my VUDU from any room in the house using NetStreams DigiLinX user interface from my touch screens, wireless controllers, or computers.

VUDU makes two versions of their box; one for consumers and one that they sell to professional installers. The pro version, VUDU XL, has a lot more memory, ships with the IR dongle, and can be controlled via TCP-IP commands over the home network. All other features are the same. Vudu recently announced a rack-mount box (VUDU XL II).

VUDU’s user interface is every bit as nice at the Apple TV’s user interface, and I find their organization of selections a lot better. A couple of features that they don’t offer at this time is the access to YouTube, which for me is not a big deal, and access to pictures for viewing on a TV. The latter is a great feature for parties, viewing vacations and much more.

VUDU currently offers over 11,000 movies available for rent and/or purchase and this number is growing fast every month. Where VUDU rises far above the other is in their performance. Not only do they store all of the previews for the movies offered, in the box for instant viewing with no downloading time, but once you select a movie to watch, for most folks, it begins to play instantly if you have a 4mbps connection or faster. Where the connection is slower, it can take up to several minutes to download enough of the movie where it will play, but once you start the movie, the download continues in the background with no interruption to your movie experience.

VUDU is currently the only movie box company that offers a HD 1080p in both Component and HDMI output. Movies are available in SD (standard definition), HD (high definition), and HDX (high definition extreme). VUDU is the only on-demand movie provider that offers movies in 1080p, at twice the resolution of any other streaming movie provider. HD and HDX movies are both rented/sold at the same price, but HD is available instantly with a 4mb or faster Internet connection, while HDX can take up to several hours to load. When we know what movie we want to watch that evening, downloading it over several hours is not a problem. However, if we select our movie in real-time, HD still looks great and much better than a movie in standard definition. HDX looks so good, that the average person won’t be able to tell the difference between it and a Blu-ray movie. It is even more impressive on large TVs or movie theaters, because the video artifacts that you would expect to see with a highly compressed movie, are not there. The high definition audio provided with the HDX movies is the best I have heard from a movie box, and VUDU claims that it is 40% higher bit-rate than surround sound DVDs.

Movie prices range from $0.99 to $5.99, TV programs range from $0.50 to $1.99, and to rent the entire season varies from $9.99 to $34.99. The list price for the VUDU box is $299 for their ‘Standard’ VUDU box, which stores about 50 SD movies, and $999 for the XL box, which stores 500 SD movies, but this box is only available through integrators. VUDU charges no monthly fees.

Netflix is a company to watch, mainly because they have been the leaders in the movie-by-mail with over 8 million subscribers, and they have 100,000 movies in their rental library. However; currently they aren’t licensed by the studios to rent most of their movies online, but I am sure that this will change over time. They claim to have over 12,000 movies and TV episodes to stream instantly online. The interesting thing about Netflix, which excites most avid movie watchers, is that Netflix is subscription based. The subscription you select determines how many movies per month you can order, but at least for now, the online movies are offered in an ‘all you can watch’ buffet, for all of the subscriptions, except for the entry level subscription. I anticipate that over time, other movie boxes will add a subscription based model to their offerings, because it makes a lot more sense.

The current Netflix movie box is made by Roku. Like Apple TV and VUDU, this box is small and light. A big downside of this box, for me, was to discover that it only does 480p and does not offer HD video at all. Roku has announced that they plan to offer HD by the end of the year, so I will report on that at another time. If you are one of those consumers that owns an HDTV or projector, and looking for great quality video (at least DVD quality), then you should consider one of the other three boxes. I would say that the video quality from the Roku/Netflix box is worse than that of a DVD, because it is highly compressed, but for some movie watchers, this is acceptable.

The Roku/Netflix box is controlled via an IR remote control. I also control it with my DigiLinX touch screens and web pages, because the NetStreams DigiLinX IP video encoder has an IR output for control. I found their on screen interface to be simple, but boring. It needs to step up a lot in the ‘eye-candy’ department, like Apple TV and VUDU.

My biggest issue with the Roku/Netflix box is that it is not for the common person. You have to be a computer user to use this box, otherwise you have no way to load the movies you want to watch, into the box. In order to watch a movie on this box, you have to select it online. Unlike VUDU and Apple TV, you can’t watch previews on your TV and select the movie. Once you decide what to watch, it is not an instant experience. You have to wait for the movie to download and depending on your connection speed, this can take a while.

Netflix now offers their movies on the Xbox 360 platform – in HD, and soon will offer them on TiVo boxes too. If you have a Microsoft Media Center PC, there is a plug-in available for you too that will let you watch Netflix movies on those platforms too.

My Conclusion

Here is how I stack up the three boxes stack up the three movie boxes:

Roku/Netflix box: Good

Apple TV box: Better

VUDU box: Best

There are other service providers/players coming into the market soon. One notable one to watch also is Blockbuster, which recently purchased MovieLink, a movie-on-demand service provider. In my opinion, movie providers like Blockbuster and Netflix have the advantage with the masses, if, and only if they execute well. This would require them to focus on being the movie provider and let the hardware providers offer the player (the Microsoft strategy with PC providers). It looks like Netflix is well on its way of becoming exactly that. Blockbuster should do the same.

Apple will probably do their own thing with the Apple TV box and iTunes, but they won’t win as big here as they did in the portable music player market, because there are other super powers already in play in this market, with significant bases of subscribers/customers.

VUDU has the upper hand right now in performance and can keep that lead if they focus their resources on technology advancements, the high-end market, and selling to system integrators. They made some significant progress there this month by offering a rack mount movie player, which integrators will love. VUDU may eventually have to open up their platforms to Netflix streams and potentially Blockbuster streams too as customers will want multiple service providers. They could then up-sell those customer bases to their incredible HDX movies over time. If they stay in a high-end niche only, offering the best performance available, they could dominate that sector. If they instead choose to be a movie service provider, they will have to offer their VUDU streams to the box/player manufacturers.

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

Movie Boxes Today and into the Future (Part One)

2008-11-18T23:08:00.008-06:00

As consumers, today you have more choices than ever before for movies. If you wish to watch a movie at home, you can obtain it from your local video store, via mail from services such as Netflix and Blockbuster, from your Cable or Satellite Company’s video-on-demand service, and now you can also get them via a movie box, streamed across the Internet.

Driving to the video store for a movie has become an expensive proposition when you consider the cost of fuel. And although ordering movies via mail from Blockbuster or Netflix is a good deal if you watch a few movies a month, it has become a hit-and-miss proposition. I love Netflix, but lately, it seems that 30% of the movies that we receive from them are damaged and cannot be played. Netflix, however, is great about sending out a replacement if you want, but that is inconvenient and if you are like most of us who watch movies on the weekend, you have to wait for the following weekend to watch that movie.

Although many movie watchers continue to pick up movies from their local video store, the numbers are dropping as people discover the convenience of selecting and ordering a movie, right from their TV. This service has been available from your Cable or Satellite provider, but the issue has been that their offerings are extremely limited; usually 5-10 movies to select from. When you compare this to a movie box that offers immediate access to over thousands of movies available for rent and/or purchase, the Cable/Satellite Company’s movie-on-demand services seems highly inadequate.

For those of you that are new to movie boxes, a movie box is a box that connects to the Internet via your broadband connection and offers you the ability to rent and/or buy a movie from a wide selection, currently ranging from 1,000-12,000 titles, on your TV or theater. These movies can be selected by title, cover art, category, new releases, high definition releases, actors, directors, etc… Most movies have a ‘preview movie’ option available, which makes movie selection fun and convenient because you can watch the movie trailers of most movies, even movies that you never even heard of, before deciding to watch it. Most previews can be viewed full screen too. Once you opt to watch a movie, depending on your Internet connection speed, the movie may start immediately or can take up to a few minutes before you can begin to watch it. If your connection speed is 4mbps or greater, you can start watching an HD movie, as soon as you press play. If your connection is slower, it may take you a little longer before you can start and watch the movie.

The top three movie boxes in the market today are Apple TV, VUDU, and Netflix, a solid movie-by-mail provider for years. In my next post, I will talk about each movie box and tell you the pros and cons of each, based on my personal experience with these boxes.

Movie boxes offer a lot of promise and have the potential to replace Cable and Satellite in homes where TV is a low priority or where the users don’t watch real time TV and prefer to watch prerecorded programs. Most of the movie boxes are already offering the most popular prerecorded programs, which you can watch for $0.50 per program, or $34.99 for the entire season. In addition, some of these boxes give you the ability to view/watch pictures or video stored on your PC or network, on your TV of choice. I predict that some of these boxes will even venture off into offering video conferencing and gaming in the future.

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

It’s All About the Sources (Part Two)

2008-10-09T11:21:00.014-05:00

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

It’s All About the Sources (Part One)

2008-10-09T11:10:00.009-05:00

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

Multi-Room Video Today

2008-04-08T11:56:00.007-05:00

My new motto is “Sources are meant to be enjoyed, but not seen”. Since our homes are now being filled with elegant flat screen displays, why on earth would anyone want to clutter a room with bulky equipment furniture to store the sources, DVDs, and speakers? Why not hang the display (Plasma or LCD), recess the speakers, and centralize all of the sources in one location (usually a closet or equipment room)? This would make your ‘significant other’ extremely happy and make your room appear bigger.

Although there are a large number of high definition sources available today, and more coming as outlined in my previous blog post, there are not many methods that support the distribution of high definition video/audio signals. The video distribution solutions offered by structured wiring centers, found in most new homes today, are not suitable for distribution of high definition video. The splitters and amplifiers found these structured wiring centers are OK for the distribution of cable or satellite TV signals, if you plan on installing a set top box in each room, but even then, these products can’t distribute the signal without some signal degradation. If you centralize your set top boxes and redistribute the signals over coax, then you not only lose picture quality, but you also lose the 5.1, 7.1, Dolby or DTS audio signals offered with some of the new programming (broadcasted movies/games).

For large homes, the best method for video distribution has been to use matrix switches and a lot of cabling to each room for multiple signal types. These systems distribute the video using analog methods. This means that the further your video signals have to travel, the more video performance you are sacrificing. In many cases, these systems also require other equipment like converters and scalers to optimize the picture for each type of display, attenuators and a lot of tweaking. And after you have the video working, a control system must be installed to direct the video from each source to its destination(s), whenever the user presses a particular button in the control system. These control systems require a lot of design, programming and the cost of installation and programming can many times exceed the cost of the distribution equipment.

Several manufactures now offer high definition video distribution solutions over CAT 5, and NetStreams is one of these companies, however, not all CAT 5 systems are created equal. Performance should be compared by your professional integrator. Our Panorama video system is designed to distribute high definition video from sources to multiple rooms, and does a great job at that. Until recently, this is what I used in my home for video distribution and control and my family and I were very pleased with the quality. We married Panorama (video distribution) with DigiLinX, which we use for audio distribution and control, and the experience was seamless. Although we distributed the video over Panorama and the audio and control over our home network, we had no delay or lip-syncing issues between the audio and video. We simply would select any source from any room, and we could count on solid performance and the highest in picture quality, every time. If your home does not require any runs that are longer than 1,000 ft. from the head-end to the room, than NetStreams’ Panorama video distribution will meet your high definition distribution needs.

In addition to distributing video, Panorama saved us a significant amount of money by also handling the control of the video sources and displays around our home. This eliminated the need for additional runs of cable to control (IP, IR, and/or RS-232) the displays and sources, and a lot of programming to control what signals go where and when.

Panorama simply requires one CAT 5 from the head-end (where your sources are located) to each room. This CAT 5 then plugs into a Video Port, which fits into a one-gang electrical box behind your display. Your display then plugs into Panorama’s Video Port; Composite, S-Video (better), or Component (best). Panorama allows you to switch between four video sources. If you marry Panorama to DigiLinX, you can distribute up to 8 sources to each room, if you double up on the Video Ports. Two video ports will fit in one two-gang box, and a standard 2-gang Décora plate.

Recently, I upgraded our video distribution system to NetStreams’ DigiLinX IP video products. Honestly, if you are on a tight budget for the electronics in your home and you don’t have any runs that are over 1,000 ft, our Panorama system will offer you everything you could want in a high definition video distribution system. But, if you have the discretionary budget and want to have the *best commercial grade video distribution system available today, then DigiLinX IP video is for you. I try not to turn my blog posts into commercials, but our DigiLinX IP Video products have received so much recognition over the last 12 months, that it is worth mentioning it here. I will post these at the end, in case you are interested.

Although most people may not see a video image difference between Panorama and DigiLinX IP video, there is a difference and it does offer some very nice control and audio options. The biggest benefits of owning an IP-Based video distribution are yet to come. For NetStreams, its IP Video products is a platform, which it will build a lot of applications for and offer as upgrades. On my wish list (but not committed by NS yet) are: live thumbnails of all of my streaming sources, a custom guide where I can mix channels from any source (i.e. Chan. 1 = My Picasa channel to display my family photos from the Internet, Chan 2 = My uTube channel; another Internet channel, Chan 3 = CNN from Satellite, Chan 4 = HBO from my cable box, Chan 5 is my Blu-ray player, etc…), and an onscreen control panel to view my security camera and control my lighting, HVAC, and more.

A common mistake that most people make is to assume that CAT 5 makes it an IP system. That is simply not the case with most CAT 5 systems today. In fact, most are merely using CAT 5 cable for line-driving analog video signals from point to point. To capture the full benefits of streaming sources, IPTV, and the new networked source arriving, if you can, you will want to have IP Video.

DigiLinX IP Video is comprised of a source encoder (MediaLinX A/V) and a decoder (ViewLinX) for each display. Each source and display are given their own IP address, and the home network not acts like a matrix switch, allowing any source to be viewed on any one or more displays, at anytime. DigiLinX IP video products will accept Composite, S-Video, Component, or VGA (1280 x 768). It will even transcode video signals in real time (i.e. convert VGA from a computer to Component for viewing on a Component display).In my next Blog, I will talk about the many exciting video sources available today, including some of the ones that I am currently enjoying: Blu-ray DVD, Vudu, Apple TV, HTPC (Home Theater PC), and multi-room DVR from my DirecTV.

*NetStreams DigiLinX IP Video Solution:

In June of 2007, commercial integrators voted DigiLinX IP Video as ‘Product of the Year’ at InfoComm 2007 – the industry’s leading audio/video and now networking tradeshow.
Audioholics.com named DigiLinX as its 2007 Consumer Excellence Award winner.
Electronic House Magazine honors NetStreams with 2007 Products of the Year Award
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA®) selected DigiLinX as a 2008 CES Innovations Design and Engineering Award winner.

DigiLinX IP Video products also won a Perfect Vision's Editor's Choice Award in the Emerging Technology category. Named as the “Most Forward-Looking Multi-room Video System”.
Robb Report Home Entertainment Magazine awarded NetStreams DigiLinX a “Top 10 Best Gear Award for 2008” The magazine’s editors who evaluate several hundred products, called DigiLinX the “world’s most advanced entertainment system,” and highlighted the unique benefits of NetStreams’ DigiLinX Multi-Room IP-Based A/V solution, including superior audio/video quality, modularity, easy expandability, and future compatibility of the IP-Based A/V solution.

Most recently, CEA’s TechHome division honored NetStreams with two ‘Mark of Excellence’ awards: ‘Best Distributed Audio/Video Product’ and ‘IP-Based Product’.

Herman Cardenas

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

Distributing Video Sources Around Your Home

2008-02-08T11:45:00.005-06:00

When I was growing up, distributing video was simple; buy a new TV, add a rabbit-ear antenna, then tweak the antenna several times until the TV’s picture looked as good as it could get. Depending on the day, and the weather, sometimes you had to stand near the antenna, in a certain position, just to get a picture on the TV. If you had the money and a house, you could install a roof-mounted antenna and run a cable from each television to the outdoor antenna. This typically required professional installation.

(This is off the subject a bit, but does anyone besides me remember the poor man’s color TV? This was very popular in NYC. It was a multi-color laminate overlay that was taped onto the TV’s picture tube to give the impression of a color picture. I don’t remember the exact order of the colors, but I think that the bottom was brown (for ground), next up was green for grass, red for faces, and the top was blue for skies.)

Then came Cable TV, and what a delight that was; many channels, all clear, and you didn’t have to futz around with the set top antenna. The downside was that you had to pay for the service. Later came Satellite TV, but for the most part, it was the same as Cable TV, except that it required the installation of a satellite dish. For people that did not have access to Cable TV, this was a godsend.

Today, although you can still get your television programming off the air (even in HD), and from Satellite and Cable service providers, there are new players like AT&T and Verizon offering television programming through your telephone wires or new fiber optic cabling. And then there is the brand new frontier of IPTV, which is television-like programming, distributed through the Internet.

The quality of the programming and movies that we watch has and continues to change, and improves every few years. New televisions and players now offer high definition, and the industry has gone mostly digital. In fact, by February of next year, all analog broadcasting will cease and televisions will have to be digital in order to view any programming.

Movie distribution to the consumer will change very fast over the next few years too. Movie-on-demand boxes are now available from other companies beyond our Satellite of Cable companies, and there are some unique advantages with going to these new movie providers. The most important point is that you can select a movie-on-demand from thousands of movies instead of a dozen. You can also buy or rent the movies and even store them on your movie box. Trailers for each movie are also available. Most of these boxes will get their content and meta-data via the Internet. Soon, these same companies will offer network television on demand. So if you missed an episode of Lost, you won’t have to sit in front of your PC to watch it.

But In order to truly experience the benefits of digital programming, online movies, IPTV, and the myriad of new sources that are becoming available, your home’s video distribution infrastructure must also go digital. So far, this has not been the case. Our industry is still pushing analog technology. Can you imagine using the large brick Motorola cell phones, today? Well, most homes today still use 40+ year old technology to distribute video around the home.

Although I love the concept of ‘structured wiring panels’ when it comes to video distribution, they are just about obsolete, because they still use splitters and RF amplifiers to distribute Cable or Satellite Television around your home. Coax will be around for a while longer if you are getting your content from the Cable, Satellite or Telephone service providers, but this does not mean that you have to distribute the content they provide, around your house using coax once it comes out of the set top box. It also doesn’t make sense, today, that you have a set top box in each room. They don’t look good, you pay a monthly charge for each box, and with wall mounted flat screens, why would you want to clutter your room with bulky furniture filled with black boxes? Why not locate all of your sources in a dedicated closet, but controllable from anywhere in your home? With the right system, this is now very simple to do.

Let’s take a look at the video sources available today:

Television Programming: Available from Satellite, Cable, and telephone companies. My favorite is DirecTV because they have more HD channels than any other Satellite or Cable service provider: 100+ and growing.
High Definition DVD players: High definition DVD players are here now and some selling for under $200. In my opinion, Blu-ray is the clear winner. I have several of these players, but my favorite Blu-ray player today is Sony’s S301 Blu-ray DVD, because it is inexpensive and outputs HDMI and Component video simultaneously (not all do). This is important if you want to distribute a movie to multiple displays at one time. I have been asked by many people if a Blu-ray player can play standard DVDs and CDs, and the answer is yes. In fact, most players will up-convert a Standard Definition (SD) DVD, which means that the movie should look much better.
Movie boxes: These are the most exciting sources to appear in a long time. For as little at $229-$1,000 you gain access to thousands of movies-on-demand (some in high definition) and you pay no monthly services. No more trips to the video store or waiting for movies via mail. You can either buy the movie or rent it for as little as $2.99 each. The top two online service providers are Apple TV and Vudu, but In my opinion, VUDU is a company to watch. They are the TIVO of the movie world, and they got it right. Not only are there no monthly service fees with their box, but they make the movie buying or renting experience fun, and with a rich user interface, and you don’t need a PC or MAC. Their solution, married with some of the NetStreams products that I will describe in an upcoming post, rivals some of the high-end video server solutions found in the market today.
Video Servers: These are dedicated servers that are designed to take user own movies and store them for playback. Most of these solutions run on Windows or Linux platforms. Many of these manufacturers are now combining music storage with movie storage on the same box.
Media Center: This is a PC based entertainment solution that continues to get better with each passing year. Using Microsoft’s simple to use Media Center interface, you can access your libraries of pictures, music, movies and games.
IPTV from the Internet: IPTV is content that is available (some free and some by paid subscription) via broadcast or on-demand streams from service providers that distribute over the Internet. Although most IPTV watchers today are doing so on a PC, tomorrow’s watcher will be watching this programming on any display device in their home. IPTV will experience huge growth over the next decade, and many predict that it will overtake content distribution over Cable and Satellite, for many reasons.
Distributed Picture: Many companies are popping up everywhere with digital picture frames. The second generation of these allow you to pull pictures from your home server. So we need to consider this application as a source, because you may want to display pictures on your televisions too.
Gaming Sources: Let’s not forget gaming as a source. Although gaming has been primarily a one room experience, methods of distributing the video output of gaming boxes, along with their control signals are being developed and some released now. If you are able to store your games in your box, and access them and control them in any room, this will make gaming a more widely used source.

So... with all of these sources in play, how do you distribute the video from these around your home while maintaining the same quality that is outputted from the source? How do you control the sources from any room? For these answers and more, you will need to read my next post – Multi-Room Video Today.

Herman Cardenas

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

The Celebration

2007-08-17T11:49:00.003-05:00

Dear readers,

Today our company celebrated our 5 year anniversary. Our team thought it would be great to share this with my Blog readers. The following is a letter that I read to our NetStreams team, at our celebration today.

__________________________________

To the NetStreams Team,

Today we celebrate two significant milestones – the anniversary of the Company, and the anniversary of our Startup Team. It is not often in life when we can stand back to look at an accomplishment and say, “If I had to do it all over again, I would do it again with the same team”. As I think about the things that I would change if I had to do it all over again, to achieve a better outcome for this Company, the one thing that I would do exactly the same, is to hire the same startup team. The accomplishment want to highlight for a moment is – the building of the foundation that allowed our beloved Company – NetStreams, to reach its five year milestone; one that most startups never get to see.

The Startup Team (2002)

Mike Braithwaite
Paul Bryson
Kirk Prisock
Buzz Goddard
Tim Burks
Bill Levene
Peter Radekevich
Dan McGauley

As I stand back today looking at five years of this Company’s history, the many trials and tribulations, challenges and achievements; the stressful times, the sad times, and the happy times, which of course outweigh the bad times, it is easy to see now what has shaped this Company’s culture. So what allowed us to get to where we are today? – It was our passion and love for what we do, our unshakable faith – knowing that we were the team to do it, our tenacity and courage – which never allowed us to throw in the towel when times got tough, and our commitment to change an industry by changing the rules with compelling products and technology that solve real problems and bring joy to people’s lives.

What is music to me? It was one of the first things that brought joy to my life and wooed me to fall asleep as a baby. It is the element that stirs my memories and has left markers at some critical, and some not so critical junctures in my life. It is fuel to my inspiration and joy to my soul. It moves me and it makes me move. But as life gets busy and time speeds up, we often forget much of the music and the impact it had on us.

So, ‘who’ is NetStreams to me? It is the Company that developed the products that made me ‘fall in love with my music all over again’. Soon, NetStreams will do the same for our movies and videos. ‘What’ is NetStreams? It is a team of spectacular people with a diverse set of skills, every one of which is needed in order to accomplish this most important mission – helping people re-discover their First love – Music.

Thank you all for being part of our NetStreams team.

__________________________________

Over the last 5 years, NetStreams has experienced an overwhelming amount of growth and has seen a lot of changes, both inside and outside of the company. We now ship into 45 countries around the world, and continue to lead the industry in IP-Based audio, video distribution products and control. It takes great people to build a great company, we have that here.

I’d like to thank our customers out there for being a part of our success. If you are one of them, and would like to share some thoughts, feel free to drop me a note.

Herman Cardenas

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

Falling in Love with your Music All Over Again

2007-08-13T10:42:00.002-05:00

My family and I have recently realized that our multi-room system has made us fall in love with our music and movies all over again. CDs that I haven’t heard in 5-10 years, because they were in a box somewhere in the garage, now appear on my list of hundred of CDs and I am rediscovering them all over again. You name the genre, and we probably have it.

The same is happening with our movies. One point of caution though… once you go High Definition (my preference is Blu-ray… more on this in another post), you’ll never want to watch anything else. Well….never is probably too strong of a word. But I will say this, “When we watch DVDs that are in SD (Standard Definition) now, the different between them and HD is obvious to us; even our 10 year old daughter recently said “Daddy, that’s not Blu-ray® right?”, the last time we watched an standard definition DVD movie, and she was right. But…I’ll talk about video and our video distribution in my next post.

The audio distribution in our IP home was accomplished though a NetStreams®’ IP-Based DigiLinX™ system which offers an amazing and very satisfying performance. Instead of brute forcing analog audio signals through long runs of big cables around our home, which causes the audio to degrade over distance, picking up noise and distortion along the way, DigiLinX uses our home’s network to distribute a virtually unlimited number of digital IP streams from our audio sources, to any room(s) or groups of rooms, of choice. The quality of the audio is very impressive and it is largely due to the fact that NetStreams’ StreamNet™ technology reproduced the audio, bit-for-bit, exactly how it comes out of the source component; so the better the source and source content, the better the audio will sound. I should mention that the side other of great audio is having great speakers. In my case, I am using Polk Audio speakers.

Sources:
I used to think that our XM Radio source, which receives compressed audio, sounded pretty good, and even better than our MP-3 music files, but now that we have compared it to the music content that we have stored in WAV (uncompressed audio format), on our NAS (Networked Attached Storage), the difference is amazing. Our WAV files sound great and equal to the quality of music that comes out of our high-end CD player, directly. The reason this is that WAV is the format that music is natively stored in, on all CDs. We still listen to our XM Radio stations, for songs and artists that we don’t have music for in our NAS, but our best sounding source is now our NAS, which delivers WAV audio streams.

To organize all of the MP-3 and WAV music found in our PCs and network attached storage, we installed another NetStreams product called “Streaming Music Manager”, which simply plugs into the home network. This product then locates all of our music stored on PCs, MACs, networked attached storage, and other computing devices around our home, and aggregates the music into one list of Songs, Artists, Album, Genre, and Playlists, for easy playback. Now we don’t have to remember where the music is stored. It doesn’t matter. We can also choose any of the individual computing device where some of our music is stored, for playback.

Another cool source that we have is our iPod®. To select, control and listen to the music stored in our iPods, we use an in-wall docking station called iPort, made by a company called iPort™ – a Sonance® company. Our friends like to bring their iPods over, dock them in our iPort, and play their music around the house. People find this way cool!

For local only radio stations and sporting events, we also have a Parasound® FM tuner, whose audio is also distributed and controlled from any room in our house.

And finally, we also distribute the audio from our (3) satellite boxes, located in our equipment rack in the theater.

How our NetStreams DigiLinX system works:
There are two methods to accomplish multi-room audio distribution. The first and more traditional method is to distribute the audio from centrally located amplifiers. The downside to this method is that the audio is pushed up to its destination through copper cables that allow the audio to pick up noise and distortion along the way, and also losing a significant amount of the power produced by the amplifier(s). This results in a lower performance. The other method is distributed amplification. In a distributed amplification system, the amplifiers are placed in each audio zone or at the speaker. The closer the amplifiers are to the speaker, the less power will be lost and the less audio noise and distortion will be developed. This is the method that that NetStreams DigiLinX system uses.

In our home we have about 20 distributed audio zones; each capable of playing music from any of the audio sources that we have configured to play in that room. The wiring from each zone where we have installed a SpeakerLinX IP-Based amplifier, to the ’head-end’ (the place/rack where our equipment is centrally located), is CAT 5e + 14-4 (4-conductors of #14 gauge), which is the industry standard for distributed audio – CEA 2030.

In my home I used two types of SpeakerLinX IP-Based amplifiers, available from NetStreams. The SL220 is a 20 watt per channel amplifier and I used these in our smaller audio zones. In the larger audio zones I used the SL250 amplifiers, which are 50 watts per channel.

Each SpeakerLinX amplifier, typically installed in a closet or behind furniture in the audio zones, fits in a backless 2-gang electrical box (installed at electrical outlet height) and is covered with a ribbed plastic plate (available in various colors). Like all amplifiers, they do get a little warm, but are designed and UL approved for installation in walls, but can also be mounted on walls with an optional mounting plate. The small footprint makes it an easy and convenient installation. The CAT 5e cable digitally deliverers the IP streams to the amplifiers and the 4-conductor cable is used to power the amplifiers from a central power supply located at the rack. Where a central power supply is not possible, local power supplies can be used instead. In addition to the latter connections, the audio zone’s speakers are also connected to the SpeakerLinX IP amplifier and after software configuration, the zone is ready to play audio.

I saved the best for last. NetStreams is very proud to be the pioneer of IP speaker technology and to have partnered up with Polk Audio to produce the world’s first IP speakers. Of course you know that as a ‘Toywizard’, I had to have a few pairs of these IP speakers. I had one pair installed in our living room, one pair in my home office, a pair in the Master Suite, and (6) pair in my home theater. All I am say about the audio that comes out of these speakers is “awesome”! You have to experience these for yourself; simply incredible.

Aside from the incredible audio performance that NetStreams technology and products offers, the thing that my family and I enjoy the most is the simplicity of the DigiLinX’s intuitive interface, and the rich experience that that it delivers. As I complete this Blog post, I am sitting in my backyard, listening to some great music, and I am selecting and controlling that music from my laptop.

Cheers!

Herman Cardenas

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

Audio / Video Around the World

2007-07-02T07:24:00.002-05:00

Hello Readers – Once again I find myself having to apologize for not keeping up with my Blog. Over the last three months, I have been jet-setting around the US and internationally and have managed to travel to many wonderful cities on business, including: Mexico City, London, Dubai, San Francisco, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Myrtle Beach. At least I found a slot in all that travel to take a cruise with my family on a Caribbean vacation. However, I did get a hard time from the family for taking pictures of the digital signage displays at the port of entry and ship; just could not resist.

The wonderful thing in common that I find, as I travel around the US and internationally, is the love for music and movies. And everyone loves those flat screens. The adoption of high definition movies, however, is a bit further behind the US, but I was told at the CEDIA UK that over the last few months, the buzz about high definition movies has increased substantially. They expect the sales of high definition players and movies to take off now.

Dubai was a wonderful place to visit. I even got to see a ski resort inside of a mall, with people skiing and snow boarding – unbelievable! I have never seen as many modern buildings and new construction in one place as I witnessed there. Over 1,500 new towers, residential and commercial, are either in construction or about to start construction in Dubai, and more behind those every month. And guess what? All planned with digital signage and multi-room audio and video.

Another thing about what I am seeing across the globe is that, where a few years ago custom electronic installers everywhere were saying “IP what?”, now everything is about IP products. The tradeshows also are making it all about the convergence of IP and audio video, or networked entertainment.

There are so many exciting technologies and products in development now, by so many companies, including NetStreams. This coming month we release our IP Video products, and the response at the shows so far has been overwhelming. The future looks exciting and fun, and I am just glad to be a part of it.

I will be busy this week working on the continuation of my IP Home Blog posts.

Cheers!

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

Planning and Designing your IP Home

2007-03-21T07:34:00.002-05:00

What is an IP Home anyway? An IP Home is a home whose systems and products (entertainment, lighting, cameras, thermostats, etc…) are integrated to work seamlessly over a home network. These systems/products use the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as their glue. IP Homes typically contain a combination of both wired and wireless products. This all sounds very complicated, and it is, but if installed and configured correctly, for the end-user, this actually translates into simplicity and a lot of convenience – a richer experience.

Ground-zero for most electronic products are the custom electronics industry tradeshows like CEDIA, EHX, and CES, where Integrators/Installers go to learn and see the latest and greatest products and systems. Over the last 5 years, the reaction in our industry tradeshows has gone from – “IP what”? to “This is the future of digital entertainment and control in homes – and I have to have it”. IP is now the new buzz at these shows.

With so many electronic lifestyle products, including entertainment PCs and MACs now available for homes, how does one go about selecting and designing an IP Home? The key to this is research and/or finding a good ‘Integration company’ that understands and installs IP-Based systems. Investing in products that are not IP-Based today is like buying an extremely ripe fruit. It is no longer a question as to whether homes will have networks, or whether TVs will have Ethernet connections in the future. Many consumer products selling today have, or will soon have, Ethernet connections. And in the future, they all will. After making a significant investment in ‘electronic/computing products’, don’t you want these to interoperate seamlessly in your home? Unfortunately, without a professional’s help, even products that are IP-Based, don’t do this automatically.

So… how do we plan for and design an IP Home? The first thing that you need to establish is you budget and your priorities for the products that you want in your home. I tie these two together because I have concluded that no matter how much money you have, unless you have several million dollars to assign to your electronic systems (and some people do), you will probably have to make choices on what you want to spend your money on. These will be different family to family. For my family, because we enjoy music so much, it was multi-room audio. Although we enjoy watching movies a lot too, we knew that the multi-room audio system would get used the most. But let me tell you…. It was hard, because we wanted to do everything possible. Our budget kept climbing every week, until we finally got to the pain threshold. We then had to defer some things and reduce our budget in some categories in order to get what we wanted in our priority categories.

The good news about designing an IP Home is that if you plan ahead and you wire it properly, as per my earlier blog post, you don’t have to do it all at once. You can scale your electronic lifestyle, one system or product at a time.

The most common areas to consider as you plan are:
Multi-room Audio
- Standard Analog audio distribution – for background music (Good)
- High fidelity audio distribution (Better)
- IP-based audio distribution (Best)

Multi-room Video
- Traditional coax RF distribution (Good)
- Balanced-line video distribution (Better)
- IP-based video distribution (Best)

Home Theater(s)
- Combo rooms with a home theater system (Good)
- Controlled-light multi-purpose room (Better)
- Dedicated Home Theater room (Best)

Intercom
- Stand-alone Intercom System (Good)
- Integrated Phone/Intercom System (Better)
- Intercom System that uses your multi-room audio speakers (Best)

Lighting Control
- Power line or RF Lighting control system (Good) – For retrofit (Best)
- Wired lighting control system (Better)
- IP-controlled and wired lighting control system (Best)

Security System (including cameras)
- Wired or Wireless Security System (Good)
- Wired or Wireless Security System with Fire Protection (Better)
- IP-based Wired or Wireless Security System with Fire Protection (Best)

Automated shades and curtains
- Since there are no IP-Based shades available yet, you will have to control these through your lighting system or contact-relay controller

Climate Control (HVAC)
- This one is a touchy one. Although I love the idea of integrating everything in your home, if you are building a new home and you invest in a multi-zone HVAC system with high efficiencies, you should never have to control your thermostat remotely; unless you go on vacations a lot and want the ability to take your home out of temperature setback remotely. In our home, after the first 30 days of tweaking the temperatures and times, we haven’t found the need to touch the thermostats. However, if you have the need to remotely control your thermostat(s), and IP-Based thermostat like AprilAire is a great option.

Other (Pool controls, irrigation controls, fireplaces, fans, etc…)
- RS-232 controlled input/output (I/O) control products are good, but an IP-Based I/O control product is your best option. The products connected to these I/O products can be combined with each other or other products, via programming to accomplish some very convenient things like one button control of your theater (turn on your theater equipment, open curtains, mask the screen, dim the lights, select the right audio mode, turn on the projector or display, and start the movie).

Control System
- This will be your toughest or easiest decision, depending on whether you are being given a sales pitch without good data, or one with good data. Most people, given good data, will make the right decision for them. Of course, no matter which direction you want to take, always look for a system that is IP-Based, as it will offer you the most options, longer life, and most scalability and expandability.

Each of these product categories offers a lot of choices from many manufacturers in the Custom Electronics market. Sorting through all of these choices is not something that I recommend you take on alone. By working closely with a reputable and knowledgeable Integrator, you should be able to avoid the many products/systems in the market that are not ready for prime time and don’t work well, or don’t offer the performance that you desire, or won’t scalable or grow with you, or won’t meet your needs and expectations.

Now that IP is in vogue, some manufacturers are putting Ethernet connectors on their products, and then adjusting their brochures to claim that they are IP-Based, when in fact they are not. At best, some of these products give you simple control over some functions of their product, but that is a far cry from being designed using IP technology and web services from the ground, up. Your Integrator will know how to navigate these dangerous waters.

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

Herman Cardenas

Thank you, Readers!

2007-03-20T12:43:00.002-05:00

I wanted to take out a moment to express my appreciation to all of the readers of my blog and thank you for your comments. Please keep them coming. Your comments are encouraging and give me guidance as to what my blog readers are interested in me writing about. The number of people interested in IP Homes is growing significantly, and NetStreams is feeling the ground-swell and benefiting greatly from being in the leading position of this emerging and very exciting and market.

I recently had the opportunity to meet a couple of my blog readers at the recent Electronic House Expo in Orlando. Bob – it was a pleasure meeting you and your wife and I am glad that your Integrator advised you to go to this show. Thank you for allowing me to show you what we do. : ) I hope you enjoyed yourself.

As always, feel free to email me at hermansblog@netstreams.com

The Year of IPTV and 1080P Televisions

2007-02-23T07:21:00.002-06:00

Now that you know all about wiring for an IP home, let me tell about what I believe is one of the most exciting benefits of an IP home – IPTV, which will change our television experience forever.

2007 looks to be a very promising year for many new technologies, but two of these promise to change our lives forever. This is the year that IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) will begin to go mainstream. In 2005 many of the large TV manufacturers stuck their IPTV flag in the ground by announcing that they were planning on releasing their first IPTVs in 2007. In 2006 many of the other TV manufacturers announced their plans to introduce IPTVs in the near future as well. So this is the year that we get to see these arrive at a store near you.

What is IPTV? It is television programming distributed to us over the Internet. Yes…a broadband connection will be required. Stations will be offered across the Internet as stand alone stations, and some service providers may offer a ‘build your own bundle’. What does this mean for us? More choices. More service providers will offer us ‘on demand channels’, which allow us to select from a list of pre-scheduled programs. This means that we can watch these programs whenever we want and stop, rewind, or fast forward them, just like we do with our recorded programs on our PVR/DVRs (Digital Video Recorders or Personal Video Recorders). Many of the IPTV channels will allow you to watch programs that they have streamed that week, anytime after the original broadcast, just like the major networks are doing on the Internet with their prime shows.

IPTV also offers the small guys a chance to put their programs on the web, much like Internet Radio allows anyone with a computer and a microphone to broadcast on the web. And don’t forget that you will also be able to select short videos posted on sites like U-Tube and watch them as you wish, on your TV. Not only will you be able to view them, but you will be able to post your own videos on these types of sites for anyone in the world to see, or just those that you give permission to. Everyone now has a chance for fame.

New types of programming will become available and the TV will become more interactive. So that if you see a commercial and you want more information, with the click of a button, you will be able to request that information. If you are watching a cooking program and want the recipe, a click of a button and it’s on your printer. But if you are looking for a different or related recipe, you can do that too, while you watch your favorite cook on TV.

With technologies like NetStreams' IP Video, in the future you will be able to select 4 sport events and watch them simultaneously by splitting your display into four parts. But if the baby is asleep, you will be able to assign one of those quadrants to the IP camera in the baby’s room.

1080p High Definition – Of course, IPTV would not be complete without a better High Definition display. 2007 also promises to be the year where most TV manufacturers introduce their 1080p HD displays. Most High Definition TVs sold today are 1080i. The ‘i’ stands for interlaced, which means that in reality, you are only getting 540 lines of video, alternated faster than your eye can see, so that it gives you the illusion of 1,080 lines. 1080p is actually 1,080 lines of video, which gives you twice the resolution and a much better, crisper picture. All you need to know is that the higher the number, the better. And a ‘p’ is much better than an ‘i’.

Together, 1080p High Definition and IPTV will redefine how we enjoy and interact with our televisions and our homes. Maybe its time to replace the name ‘television’ with a new, cooler name like ‘ViewPort’ or ‘IPvision’.

Of course my house is wired and ready for IPTV and 1080p television. J For more information on how you can do the same, see my previous post. In fact, I am already enjoying my Marantz 1080p projector. All I can say is… WOW!!! Oh… and you can bet that NetStreams is working on IP Video products that will support up to 1080p video distribution.

If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you: hermansblog@netstreams.com.

Herman Cardenas

Labeling and Certifying Your Cables

2007-01-30T12:24:00.002-06:00

Proper Labeling – If there is one thing that my integrator and I would do all over again, it would be to certify and properly label all of the cables in my home, during the ‘wiring phase’. This would have saved us a tremendous amount of time (days) and money. I can’t even begin to tell you how much pain and time it cost us not having properly labeled and certified cables. My Integrator’s plan was to do this done from the very beginning, but the installer that he assigned to my job chose to label my cables with numbers and then create a reference table, which he kept to himself. Sometime after my house was dry walled, this installer got fired, and as retaliation, he chose to conveniently lose this table, leaving us back at square one. It also turned out that, although he originally put numbers on both ends of the cable, when he cut the cables to stuff them into their appropriate wall boxes, he did not label the cables again.

Recommendation – Since we know what each cable is intended for prior to wiring the project, and adequate label printers are available almost anywhere, starting as low as $29.00, the way to go is to label each cable in plain English: i.e. ‘Dining Room Amplifier’, ‘Living Room Touch Screen’, or ‘Patio Speakers’. This way, if a new installer is assigned to finish the job months later, there is no guessing involved. The label maker that I bought is made by Brothers. I bought it at Office Max and it cost me $39. I then ordered special ½” label tape that is designed for application on cables. When labeling equipment that is black, like power supplies or rack mounted equipment, we used white-on-black tape. For all other label needs, we used black-on-white. Now it is so easy to see what is connected to what, and if we want to make a change, there is no guessing or ringing out cables involved.

Certifying Your Cables – There are a couple of ways to certify your cables documented and undocumented. The first is to simply test all of your cables during the ‘wiring phase’ of the job. The second is to test them, then print out the results to serve as documentation for the integrator and the customer, that all cables have been tested and passed during that phase. Although it is not required, it wouldn’t hurt to test the cables again after drywall to insure that none of the cables were damaged by other contractors on the project. In many commercial projects, this is a requirement.

Many installers believe that a simple continuity test is sufficient. It is not. That was OK for telephone, but now that we are installing devices that require significant bandwidth from your network, like IP Audio and IP Video, it is extremely important that these cables are terminated properly and that their integrity is intact, so that you can maximum performance from your network.

The difference between a reliable system and one that is plagued with problems is usually in the wiring and termination. My installer was able to demonstrate to me that a bad cable that passes the ‘network’ test with a simply continuity cable tester, can fail when tested with a proper network cable tester.

Recommendation – Test all cables during the ‘wiring phase’ of your project, before drywall and consider testing them again after drywall, if budget allows. Printing the test results of all of the cables is a great option, and may even be required on some projects.

If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you and learn what other parts of my ‘building an IP home’ experience would be helpful to you: hermansblog@netstreams.com.

Wiring for an IP Home

2006-12-29T08:23:00.003-06:00

When my wife and I began to plan our new home 3 years ago, I was determined to wire it for everything under the sun. Heading up a company that was leading the custom electronics market into the next era of technology and applications, put a significant self-imposed burden on me. Mostly because I felt that instead of keeping up with the Jetsons, it was my responsibility to ‘be’ the Jetsons.

When I started the research process, my head was filled with questions, and for awhile it seemed that the more I researched, the more questions I would generate. What cables, standards and technologies would I use in our new IP home – Coax, CAT5e, fiber, Ethernet, wireless or power line technology? And what connections would I use for my displays – HDMI, DVI, Component or other? What format would I use for streaming audio around the home – MP-3, AAC, WMA, or WAV? Whose products would I use to compliment NetStreams’ multi-room audio/video/control products, for things like lighting, cameras, thermostats, theater products, etc…? I did know one thing, and that was that I did not want to narrow down product decisions three years before our home was to be completed because of the extremely fast pace of which technology and products change in our market. I did not want to wire my home exclusively or specific to any manufacturer’s products, because I wanted our infrastructure to address the many products available at the time my home was completed in the future, and the many products coming in the future beyond that point in time. These decisions would involve a lot of research because many of these standards were still under development or just coming to the market, and were unproven.

Months later I reached my conclusion and decision, and almost three years later, it has proven to have been the right one. What I determined after the many months of research was that there was no ‘one single standard’ that would address all of my needs. Here is what I learned:

The CEA 802.3 standard (Ethernet) is the most widely used standard, internationally, for both residential and commercial computer networks, control and now audio and video distribution. CAT5e is the most widely used cable for computer networks, control, telephone, professional video distribution, and more. I learned that this 20+ year old standard is solid and provides us with the right infrastructure for current and future products. The CEA 802.3 standard suggests “home runs” from each outlet. A “home run” is a direct run of cable from the “head-end” location (the location where telephone, cable/satellite and home network cables are originated inside the home) to one or more locations in each room. Using this standard would allow me to later choose from the myriad of products and technologies available for distribution of our video, while also providing us with the cables needed for our home network and telephone needs, in each room.

OK, one decision made…. CAT5e everywhere.

Much like electricity is distributed from a central panel(s) to locations around the home, and the electricity is fed to these panels from the meter box, where the power company connects their services to, telephone, home network, cable, and satellite service providers connect to boxes outside of your home known as ‘demarcation points’ and their services are then extended to the panels where they are distributed around your home. This wiring infrastructure is called “structured wring”.

The most widely used cable for structured wiring is called a “2x2 ”, which is a bundled cable with four cables inside; two RG-6 (coax) cables used for cable/satellite television or analog camera distribution, and two CAT5e cables, used for telephone, home network, video distribution and more. The standard for structured wiring cable is the TIA/EIA 568. Although this standard covers a good portion of my infrastructure needs, I learned that implementing only this standard would not be enough, because this standard did not address the needs of our lighting control system, our multi-room audio and video system, our home control system, our security system, our IP cameras, our thermostats, or home theater. It is mostly designed for distributing home network, cable/satellite television and telephone. However, if I want to distribute high definition television signals from a central location to all of our rooms, or want to centralize my three satellite boxes so that I don’t have to add a box per television set in our home, which in our case is 8-10 TVs, traditional structured wiring solutions can’t help me. This typical requires a professionally designed system and a video matrix switch.

So that I don’t turn this blog post into a book, I’ll now summarize what I did for my wiring. Because I believe that in the future most products will be IP-based or IP-controlled, I made sure to run CAT 5e almost everywhere that I anticipated installing a product or system.

Audio Distribution: For our multi-room audio needs, I chose to use the CEA 2030 standard, as I found this to be the most flexible and best standard. This standard requires a CAT5e cable plus a 4-conductor cable (#16 or #14 gauge wires) from the head-end audio/video location to each keypad, then looped up to the speakers. This can be accomplished with two separate cables or a Siamese cable that is a cable that offers both the CAT5e and 4-conductors in one jacket, making it easier and cheaper to install. I found that other standards address the distribution of analog audio or digital audio, but not both; and I found no other standard that addressed the requirements of an IP-Based audio distribution system. The CEA2030 addresses the needs of analog, digital and IP-Based audio distribution systems. Because my company is involved in the development of technology for IP speakers, I knew that having a CAT5e available at the speaker for network connectivity, along with the 4-conductors for power was critical.

Video Distribution: Because I wanted to distribute high definition video signals around my home from centrally-located satellite boxes, so we can access and view content from any video source, (including our TIVO), from any room in the home, I found that we could not use the typical coax distribution in my GE Security structured wiring panel. Structured wiring panels typically use traditional radio frequency (RF) amplifiers and splitters for its video distribution. These do not distribute high definition signals from the new HD sources such as BluRay or HD-DVD, nor do they distribute Dolby Digital, DTS, or other similar audio effects. However we still ran 2x2 cables from the structured wiring panel to each TV location in the home, and in addition ran CAT5e cables from each location to my equipment rack. This CAT5e would be later connected to a NetStreams Panorama video distribution system for distribution of our standard and high definition video signals from our satellite boxes and our centralized BluRay player around the home. More on this product line on a future post.

Telephone / Computer Network: This one was the simplest of all of the wiring standards to implement. Since a 2x2 cable contains two CAT5e cables, by running a 2x2 home run to each location that I wanted Ethernet and/or telephone, I was able to achieve both. And in locations where I did not need telephone, I could assign the two CAT5e to our home network.

Lighting Control: Wiring for lighting control was a little different because it forced me to decide, in advance, on the type of lighting system that I was going to use and the manufacturer. The reason for this is that lighting devices fall into two general categories: a) dimmer/relay switches that are installed at the traditional switch location and then networked through CAT5e, RF (wireless), or power lines, and b) dimmer/relay modules that are installed in one or more central locations somewhere in the home. Each of these methods has its own requirements, costs, and benefits. After weighting all of these heavily and looking at many different products, I decided to use the Lutron HomeWorks products. This system required us to run a shielded CAT5e cable from each keypad location back to multiple panels that would house our Lutron dimmer and relay modules and processors. The shielded cable can be Class II (CL-2) in-wall rated cable, but Class III (CL-3) burial grade – is recommended. These cables are comprised of a pair of 18 gauge wires for power and pair of 22 gauge shielded wires with a drain ground for communications.

Other: The above wiring schemes covered the majority of the needs of our IP home, but there were other subsystems and products to think about and each of these carried its own wiring needs: Security system, Intercom, Cameras, Thermostats, Drapes/shades, Pool controls, Garage door openers, Irrigation system, Outdoor lighting and more. If you are integrating these products with your whole house control system, the wiring requirements are different than when these systems are installed ‘stand-alone’.

If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you and learn what other parts of my ‘building an IP home’ experience would be helpful to you: info@netstreams.com.

The Great Audio Experience

2006-11-14T13:31:00.003-06:00

Last year I blogged about the very audible difference between MP3 and uncompressed (WAV) audio file formats, particularly when it comes to good quality home speakers and audio systems. I must say I am extremely humbled to find so many in the artist community that support this idea of great quality audio. Compression really does ruin their work. Artists spend quite a lot of time in the studio working on the sound and ambiance of their creation, and when they do hear their songs played back over a compressed format, it can be downright demoralizing.

And now they're starting to do something about it.

The band 3 Doors Down has joined forces with the Consumer Electronics Association to promote what they call Great Audio Experience. They just launched their website today and it was very interesting to hear from them how they view audio quality.

Check it out by clicking the link below:

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

Is it Christmas yet?

2006-11-03T07:17:00.002-06:00

Last week we released a new version of DigiLinX Dealer Setup software to our authorized dealers that takes our DigiLinX system to a whole new level. Our NetStreamers have been working very hard and the result is very exciting. The following is an outline of the new products that we introduced recently or began shipping.

Favorites – This is the feature set that we have all been waiting for. Favorites allows dealers to setup ‘one button’ macros for their end-users, so that can launch a host of actions by the selection of onscreen buttons. i.e. An Evening Favorite button tells our Lutron lighting system to set the lights to a predetermined level and it turns on our jazz music. Our HBO Favorite turns on the TV, selects the correct channel, dims the lights, and sets the system to a predetermined volume. Favorites takes DigiLinX to a whole new level and it will only get better from here as our NetStreamers add more customization to Favorites and DigiLinX over time. A very cool feature introduced is that I can make Favorites my home page and even change the name to something else.

Streaming Music Manager (SSM) – This product is a rack-mount or set-top product that plugs into the network, then auto-discovers PCs, MACs, network storage or other devices that touch the network, which contain uncompressed (WAV / PCM) or compressed (MP-3) shared audio files. The SMM then proxies up to six uncompressed streams of music.

My nephew and I just installed my SMM a couple of weeks ago. In my house, I have my music and video stored on a network storage device and this product is exactly what we needed. The most exciting feature for me is that the SMM finds the music on our home network, no matter where it is stored, PCs, MACs, or Linux machines and network storage, and consolidates all of our music so that my family and I don’t have to remember where a particular song or album is stored. We see one list and we can chose our music by Song, Album, Artist, Genre, or Playlist. I am told that, in the near future, we will be able to create playlists, dynamically, by just clicking on songs that we want. I can’t wait.

One final SMM feature I want to tell you about is that when we plugged our iPod into one of the SMM’s USB ports, we were able to auto discover it on the network and extract up to six (6) streams from the iPod, along with its meta-data, so that each family member could listen to their own song from the iPod, at the same time as other users were listening to their song of choice. Very cool indeed.

DoorLinX – This is going to be the world’s first IP-based ‘door intercom’. I am told that this starts shipping this month (Nov-2006), and it can’t come a moment too soon. My wife is tired of the hole by the front door and our visitors having to knock on the door very loudly in order for us to hear them. However, I believe that it will be worth the wait.

Our IP Intercom system is the best intercom system that I have ever heard because it comes out through the room speakers and not a $2.00 speaker on a wall intercom or on a phone. Besides the obvious ding-dong, DoorLinX will give us some additional features. We will be able to select any MP-3 that we want to use as a ringer and tell it what rooms or hallways to ring into. In the future, DoorLinX will be able to play different ringers at different times of the day, or different days of the year. I can’t wait until it can also ring my phone to let me know that the UPS guy is there when we are not home. I could then answer the door and ask him to place the package on the side of the house or in the garage, after I open the door for him remotely.

MediaLinX Pro (MLA4000) – Today to integrate a legacy source product (an audio or video product that does not speak TCP/IP such as CD players, tuners, DVDs, etc…), and have that available for listening on the network with native products (music servers, PC, etc…), a NetStreams dealer must connect that source to the network via a media converter product, which NetStreams calls MediaLinX. Until now, an installer had to purchase one MediaLinX per source. NetStreams will soon bring out a 4-channel version of MediaLinX that will also bring with it some new features that dealers will be able to take advantage of to create more cool and compelling applications. This includes controlling curtains, screens, and more.

Well… that’s it for now folks. Although Christmas is less than two months away still, it sure felt like Christmas this week. You can expect that I will be playing with all of these new options and features this weekend.

In my next blog entry I plan on telling you about wiring for the house of the future – today. This allowed me to build a full IP-based home, ready for all of those wonderful IP products on the way. I am especially excited to see and ready for IPTV (more about this in another future entry).

Changes

2006-10-20T18:14:00.002-05:00

Well… no excuses…. guilty as charged. It has been a long time since I have made new entries into this blog, but I thought that given that we are launching this new website, I’d take this opportunity to recommit myself to this blog. I am also happy to announce that I have hired a new CEO – Kevin Reinis, to drive the NetStreams bus and free me up to do the things that I love to do the most – driving the vision for the Company, its products and technology, and evangelizing the emerging world of IP-based networked entertainment. In addition to the latter, I will now serve as the Company’s Chairman. I am very excited about Kevin joining our team and look forward to working with him.

Another exciting thing that has happened to me over the last few months is that my family and I have finally moved into our beautiful IP-based home here in Austin, Texas, which was under design/construction for over two years. We are delighted with our home and it is a must see house, as it is loaded with the latest and greatest IP-based systems and products including our very own DigiLinX and Panorama products. Other products used were Polk Audio IP speakers and XM tuner, Lutron, Panasonic IP cameras, Parasound tuner, Marantz and Lexicon AVRs sitting on Middle Atlantic racks. Over the next few weeks, I plan on giving you more details about this IP home and its products and share our experience with you. As they say in the industry ‘I am now eating my own dog food’. But let me tell you…. it tastes awfully yummy.

Tell Congress NOT to let Hollywood control your home!

2006-07-25T16:20:00.002-05:00

Gary Shapiro of the CEA testified recently in front of Congress against a proposal to protect this distribution and recording of all audio & video content. This proposal was made by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Way back the days when the VCR was first introduced, Hollywood was upset and concerned that people would record broadcasts and not watch live news or go to movies. A similiar hearing was held in front of Congress and legislation resulted that allow a consumer to make 1 copy for personal use.

What this new technology yielded was an entire new business resulted -- video releases of movies, video rental, etc.

Now with new digital technologies there is a push to eliminate the ability to create copies for personal use AND prevent the time and space shifting of content.

If they succeed, you can say goodbye to your TiVo. If you are one of the fortunate people to have a Multi-Room Video system, you can say goodbye to watching 1 DVD movie on multiple TVs throughout your home during a party. And forget ripping music from a CD, or distributing music to different rooms in your home for playback.

If they succeed, you will probably have to buy all new equipment. Because the broadcast flag they want to embed in the encoder and the decoder of the content hasn't been developed yet. So some CE manufacturer will have to develop some costly copy protection scheme, get everyone to adopt it as a standard, and then you'll have to buy all new expensive equipment just to receive TV or satellite radio broadcasts.

Check out Gary's speech transcript on http://www.ce.org/. And stick up for your rights as a consumer by calling your congressman!

MP-3... Not for Demanding Music Lovers

2005-10-05T09:16:00.002-05:00

If you're making the investment to upgrade your home by having a multi-room audio system installed, please remember this point....

MP3 audio quality is nice for headphones but is not as good as uncompressed (CD Quality) .WAV files.

The science behind compressing an audio file supports this, and on occasion I have heard the difference but nothing like I had heard yesterday. A friend had a party to show off his new multi-room audio system. At first glance, it was impressive -- 12 rooms of audio with in-wall keypads and high quality speakers (Polk). But we soon noticed a difference in sound quality when switching sources from his CD player to his ipod. The sound floor automatically dropped several dB and the high frequencies with the song recorded in the compressed MP3 format vs. the same song we had heard previously off of the CD were non-existant.

Simply put -- the song on MP3 sounded dull and flat over the Multi-Room Audio system, but the same song on CD sounded rich and full.

When I had asked my friend what bit rate he had recorded the song to MP3, he told me it was 300 kbps, not a bad sampling rate at all. In fact, when we unplugged the iPod and listened to the song over the small headphones, it didn't sound as flat as it did over the Multi-Room audio system, though admittedly it wasn't as good as the original CD.

We then recorded the song to an uncompressed (.WAV) file format and it sounded almost as good as the CD.

Why the difference in audio quality between MP3 and uncompressed (.WAV)? Well, let's look at the technology. MP3 audio is a specially formatted and havily compressed computer file. Depending on the sample rate, the audio quality can sound close but not equate to that of a CD. An uncompressed audio file of 1 minute consumes nearly 9 megabytes (MB) of disk space. An MP3 file uses only about 1 MB of disk space for that same minute of audio. This reduction in file size has revolutionized the delivery of music, because it is now easier to transmit music over the internet. A song that would have taken almost an hour to download (depending upon the connection speed) can now be download much quicker. However, in exchange for the smaller file size, the listener sacrifices 70% of the data that holds what some describe as the 3-D characteristics of the audio necessary to create staging, imaging, and rich audio texture. An uncompressed (.WAV) music file contains all of the data found on a CD, without any of the compression of loss of data. This offers the listener the highest quality audio available from a CD.

The difference in audio quality is of course more perceptible with better quality speakers and better quality amplification.

If you're interested in hearing for yourself the difference, visit the demo section of our website. http://www.netstreams.com/demos.aspx

Our Hearts Go Out

2005-09-03T20:54:00.002-05:00

Our hearts go out to everyone in the gulf coast who are suffering from Hurricane Katrina. Many of our NetStreams employees have donated their time and skills to the American Red Cross building computers and assisting in creating networks so that displaced people can contact their families, and those separated from eachother at various Texas shelters can be re-connected.

Our hearts are with all those suffering.

Digital Music Servers

2005-08-30T10:27:00.002-05:00

Maximizing your digital music server can allow you to take full advantage of the technology. Why? Well, think about this. Digital music servers are a great way to store and enjoy all of your songs. Depending upon the size of the hard disc drive, you can record 10,000 ~ 30,000 of your favorite songs with the cover art, artist and album information, as well as the genre for each song.

But, with a traditional system, how many songs can you listen to at one time in different rooms of your home?

Well, the answer to that depends upon the number of discrete audio outputs on the music server, because each output must be connected to a multi-channel amplifier so that it can be routed to each room.

So we were thinking....there is a fundamental disconnect with what the technology can provide from a music server and how it is implemented with a traditional system today in the marketplace. Imagine this -- I can run multiple applications on my PC. Right now I've got my browser open, my email open, an .xls spreadsheet, and a press release from my VP of marketing open on my PC, not to mention several Microsoft word documents. All open. All running at the same time.

Since a digital music server is essentially a PC (it has a hard disc drive, a microprocessor, a CD-ROM drive for recording music, and an operating system), why not be able to listen to several songs in several rooms throughout the home?

And with a traditional installation, I need to turn on my TV to listen to my music coming from a music server, because I need to be able to select what I want to listen to. So that's another cable I have to hook up. When I explained all this to my daughter a year ago, the conversation was really funny, because she kept asking "But Dad, why do I have to turn on the TV to listen to music?"

Why indeed...

With our IP-Based DigiLinX products it can be done. We've partnered with some of the best digital music server companies in the marketplace - ReQuest (http://www.request.com/); Escient (http://www.escient.com/) and Imerge (http://www.imerge.co.uk/) and made them compatible with our solution. What does this mean -- well, with one CAT5 connection from the media server to our switch, I can listen to up to 6 separate songs (or "streams" of music, as we like to call them) in different rooms or groups of room s at a time. And I don't need to run a video cable because the menu to select the songs stored in the media server appear on any touch screen in the home.

Now that's progress.

The State of the Industry

2005-08-16T09:34:00.002-05:00

I read an article today in the September / October issue of Robb Report Home Entertainment & Design about "networked control" and it struck me how far behind the consumer electronics industry is in thinking about TCP/IP. (Note this edition is not yet posted on their website but the print issue is beginning to circulate. Go to your newstand and look for this magazine. I find it very insightful!).

Yes, controlling audio, video and home automation products over TCP/IP is a no brainer. Frankly, we all should have moved towards this years ago. My company was beginning to work on this 7 years ago, back when we were the incorporated as GE Smart and were a joint venture with General Electric and Microsoft.

Why do I say the industry is behind where it should be? It seems to me that too many people in our industry think about TCP/IP in the sense that it is just another protocol, like RS-232, RF or IR.

CE Manufacturers of high end equipment started putting RS-232 connectors on their devices in 1997. In the Robb Report article, Jared Lewis (an installer) is quoted as saying "If you think about it, we never got there on RS-232. I mean, you're just starting to see RS-232 on entry level to mid-grade components." And this is now 2005!

To think that our industry may take just as long to transition to a complete IP-Based system (not just IP-Based Control) makes me worry about the future of the CE manufacturer. Our counterparts, the PC Manufacturers, move much quicker on a new technology, especially when they identify a significant enhancement which will improve the value proposition for the consumer. (The key here is improving the value proposition significantly!).

Sure, you could use TCP/IP to control products, but TCP/IP was designed to deliver content too. It's not impossible to do that. At NetStreams, we've proven that with our DigiLinX system, which has been selling for several months now. A whole host of media server manufacturers have enabled their Ethernet connections so that audio is distributed over TCP/IP (more about that in a later post).

Simply controlling A/V equipment over TCP/IP is, in my opinion, not a compelling value proposition to the market. However controlling AND distributing the entertainment content is very attractive to the consumer. Why? Well to name a few reasons:
- Audio can be distributed to multiple rooms digitally and with high resolution (over TCP/IP)
- Multiple songs can be listened to from one hard disc drive based media server (over TCP/IP)
- the system is extremely flexible and scalable

There IS a difference between IP-Based Control and a complete IP-Based system. For those investing in a new system in their home, make sure you're compatible for the future.

My First Blog Post

2005-08-12T15:35:00.004-05:00

My name is Herman Cardenas and I am Chairman and Founder of NetStreams, a company based in Austin Texas. NetStreams was formed with the idea that all consumer electronics (your TV, DVD player, Speakers, PC etc) in the home will distribute their entertainment content and communicate with each other using TCP/IP (the same language as the internet).

Why TCP/IP? It's the same language as the Internet. The architecture makes it easily expandable. It's an open protocol, so it's easier to configure a system to communicate with and control a variety of products from a variety of manufacturers. And it's the same language that the computers in your home use to talk to each other.

No Question -- IP is the future.

With this vision, Netsteams created and shipped DigiLinX, the world's first IP-Based Multi-Room Audio system in the market. (IP-Based meaning that the system distributes audio, data, and control over TCP/IP).

So what's so difficult about creating an IP-Based Multi-Room Audio system? Well the biggest issue that NetStreams overcame is the ability to synchronize the audio. Synchronization of high quality audio is important in a Multi-Room Audio system. Why? TCP/IP was primarily developed to distribute data, and never designed to be real-time. Imagine if I'm sitting in a room with 3 people and I send one email to all of them. We're all in the same room, but one person might get it before another person and so on. With audio, if you're listening to the same song in the kitchen and the dining room over an IP-Based system without synchronization, you would hear a strong echoing effect when you're walking from one room to another.

Maybe you're wondering why I wrote this blog? Well... several reasons....

I wanted to share, with interested people, my thoughts on the future of home entertainment and technologies, as wellas my personal experience with the same.
I know that from my experience as a home builder that choosing the right technology and wiring for your home (whether it's a new build or a remodel) is a confusing and frustrating experience for many, so I thought I might be able to help.
And of course, I'd like to hear your comments and ideas.

Best,

Herman