Networking Your Entertainment Center

Without doubt, the most significant news in wireless home networking —
outside of the general price drops that are driving growth in the
industry — is the movement of the 802.11-based networking outside of the
realm of computers and into the realm of entertainment.
The linkage of the two environments really yields the best of both possible
worlds. You can use your hard drive on your PC to store audio and video
tracks for playback on your TV and through your stereo. You can stream
movies from the Internet and play them on your TV. You can take pictures
with your digital camera, load them on your PC, and view them on your TV.
You get the picture (oops, pun).
You will simply not believe how much the ability to link the home entertainment
center with the PC is going to affect your computing and entertainment
experience. It could affect which PC you buy. For example, Microsoft has
teamed up with leading hardware manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard
(HP) and Gateway to offer Windows XP Media Center Edition PCs, designed
to power your home entertainment system (it’s really too irresistible). It
could affect how you rent movies — why go all the way to Blockbuster when
you can just download a movie over the Internet from Movielink (www.movie
link.com) with a single click? It could even affect how you watch your
favorite shows because with PC-based personal video recorders (PVRs), you
can record the shows that you want to watch . . . but always miss because you
could never figure out how to record on the VCR. Whew. That’s some change.
In this chapter, we expose you to some of the ways wireless home networking
is enabling this revolution toward a linked TV/PC world. You’re going to find
that a lot of what we talk about throughout the book will serve as the perfect
foundation for linking PCs and audio/video systems.
You might be thinking, “Whoa, wait a minute, I thought wireless was just for
data. Are you telling me that I need to move my PC to my living room and put
it next to my TV?” Well, rest assured; we’re not suggesting that, although you
might find yourself putting a PC near your TV sometime soon. You could
indeed put your PC next to your TV, link it with a video cable, and run your
interconnection to the living room. But if that’s your only PC and your wife
wants to watch the latest basketball game, you might find it hard to do your
work!
The revolution that we’re talking about — and are just getting started with in
this chapter and the ones that follow — is the whole home wireless revolution,
where that powerful data network that you install for your PCs to talk to
one another and the Internet can also talk to lots of other things in your
home. You’ll hear us talk a lot about your whole home audio network or a
whole home video network. That’s our code for “you can hear (view) it
throughout the house.” You built that wireless network (in Part III), and now
other devices will come and use it. And coming they are, indeed. By the
boxful. So be prepared to hear about all these great devices — things that
you use every day, such as your stereo, refrigerator, and car — that want to
hop onboard your home wireless highway.