My Top 3 Movie Boxes (Part Two)

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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

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.

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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

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