Archive for Home Networking
Posted on May 28, 2008 by Sam Costello at 5:16 pm
The Popcorn Hour A-100 media streamer is hitting the market soon. The device connects to your PC or home network via 10/100 Ethernet and routes your digital content to your TV.
The US$179 device is currently available for pre-order, with a shipping date as yet unannounced, but presumably imminent. It supports a wide range of technologies, including MPEG2 and 4, BitTorrent, NAS, YouTube video, RSS feeds, Flickr, and podcasts and is able to deliver them all to your TV via standard TV connections such as HDMI, S-video, and Composite video.
The support for Flickr and RSS feeds is what caught my eye here. With those, you’ll be able to show vacation photos on your TV, have a FrameChannel feed running as a screensaver on your TV, and much more.
Posted on May 21, 2008 by Sam Costello at 4:51 pm
When I’ve written about set top boxes in the past, it’s always been in the context of devices that will eventually support the ability to grab image content, like that served by Frame Channel, directly from the Internet, or from PCs in the house, and then serve it up on the living room TV.
Well, with the ZvBox, eventually is right now. The ZvBox, from ZeeVee, connects PCs to TVs anywhere in the house using the house’s existing coaxial cable system and plugs. Essentially, as long as you can get content onto your PC, you’ll be able to use to ZvBox to display it on your TV.
Of course this means video, but it also means content frequently updated over the web like photostreams. Users can even control their PC desktop right from their TV.
The ZvBox, the first device of its kind that I’ve seen, ships in June for US$499.
Posted on May 7, 2008 by Sam Costello at 2:12 am
Crestron, a company that sells home automation and networked home equipment, has announced that its touchpanels and 2-way systems that support dynamic text are now compatible with Windows Sideshow, a new feature of Windows Vista that provides widget functionality.
These widgets, similar to those offered by programs like Apple’s Dashboard and Google Desktop (which is compatible with FrameChannel), are applications that perform discreet, specific functions like updating sports scores, weather, and RSS feeds. The widgets are updated over the Internet.
Compatible Crestron devices will retrieve the Sideshow widgets from a PC to display elsewhere in the house.
Posted on Apr 21, 2008 by Sam Costello at 2:21 am
Gizmodo has an interesting analysis/review of HP’s Media Vault mv2120 home media server, a device designed to sit at the center of a home entertainment network and serve music, movies, photos, and other media to devices throughout the house.
The Media Vault mv2120 is in direct competition with HP’s more expensive Windows Home Server offering, the MediaSmart server, which has been plagued by a Microsoft-sourced data-corruption bug.
As Gizmodo points out, the Media Vault mv2120, which is half the price of the MediaSmart Servers, is easy to use, nearly as full-featured, and even better in some areas.
Though there have been many false starts over the years, the concept of a home media server endures because it’s a good one. In our increasingly networked homes, it just makes sense. But how we’ll get to that point is still unclear.
Given that HP’s apparently very good Media Vault is cheaper and runs Linux, does this mean that Windows home Server won’t be at the center of the smart house of the future?
Readers, if any of you have used these home media servers, leave comments about your experiences.
Posted on Mar 21, 2008 by Sam Costello at 2:11 am
WiFi is not long for this world and public hotspots will be disappearing soon, according to Johan Bergendahl, chief marketing officer of Ericsson. In its place, we’ll begin to see cellular broadband offered over HSPA, Bergendahl said last week at the European Computer Audit, Control and Security Conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
In his speech, Bergendahl touts the low-cost of HSPA connections (which are 3G speed) and their growing influence in Europe.
The merit of these claims is dubious: it’s in Ericsson’s interest to promote a technology that keeps people with the mobile phone carriers that Ericsson does its business with — especially one that can create the kind of roaming and overage charges that WiFi never incurs.
It’s an interesting claim, though, and worth noting that it’s on the minds of telecoms. We should hope it doesn’t come to pass; if it does, there are a lot of WiFi devices that won’t work anymore and the era of low-cost, boundless connectivity driving innovation could be ended.
Posted on Mar 14, 2008 by Sam Costello at 2:07 am
Microsoft has announced that it will be issuing a fix for its Windows Home Server software that causes files to become corrupt and unplayable. A fix sounds good, until you note that they’ll be offering it in June.
Windows Home Server is Microsoft’s software for making the PC the center of the home entertainment network, enabling computers to store digital media like music, movies, and photos, and stream them to any connected device in the house. It’s at the heart of HP’s MediaSmart Server and similar products.
Three months to issue a fix for a serious problem is slow in any environment, but if Microsoft wants home servers to catch on, it needs to do better than this. After all, as we begin to transition to entirely digital media and no longer have hard copies of music or movies, bugs like this could ruin collections.
Consider the impact to digital pictures: if the home server is going to be the central repository for all family photos, what will Microsoft tell customers if they lose years worth of irreplaceable family snapshots?
