Wirelessly Enabling Your Home Entertainment System

Wirelessly Enabling Your Home
Entertainment System
If you’re like most of us, your home entertainment system probably consists
of a TV, a stereo receiver, some components (like a record player, tape deck,
or CD/DVD player), and a few speakers. For most parties, this is enough to
make for a memorable evening!
And, if you’re like most of us, you have a jumble of wires linking all this
audio/visual (A/V) gear together. The mere thought of adding more wiring to
the system — especially, say, to link your receiver to your computer to play
some MP3s — is going to be a bit much.
We’ve got some good news for you. Regardless of whether you have a $250
television set or a $25,000 home theater, you can wirelessly enable almost
any type of A/V gear that you’ve got. Before we get into the specific options
on the market today, we need to discuss at a high level the wireless bandwidth
requirements for the two major applications for your entertainment
system: audio and video. Talking in general terms about this is okay because
the differences among the bandwidth options are fairly great (so applications
fall into clear camps), and we believe that most access points (APs) are
moving toward 802.11a/g dual-mode designs, which is more than enough to
handle your video and audio needs.
Here are the two predominant ways that audio and video files are handled
with your entertainment/PC combo:
Streaming: The file is played on your PC and sent via a continuous
signal to your stereo for live playback.
File transfer: The file is sent from your PC to your stereo system componentry,
where it’s stored for later playback.
These two applications are very different. The big issue here is where the file
is played from. If it’s played on the PC, for instance, it’s streamed to the
stereo for speaker amplification. If it’s played on a source stereo system component,
you just need to transfer the file. The wireless requirements are quite
different.
With file transfer, a lot of transmissions take place in the background. For
instance, many audio programs allow for automatic synchronization between
file repositories, which can be scheduled during off hours to minimize the
impact on your network traffic when you’re using your home network. And in
these cases, you’re not as concerned with how long it takes as you would be
if you were watching or listening to it live while it plays.
However, a streaming application is very sensitive to network delays and lost
data packets. You tend to notice a bad picture pretty quickly. Also, with a file
transfer, any lost data can be retransmitted when its loss was detected. But
with streaming video and audio, you need to get the packets right the first
time because most of the transmission protocols don’t even allow for retransmission
even if you wanted to. You just get clipped and delayed sound, which
sounds bad.
A good-quality 802.11b signal is fine in most instances for audio or video file
transfers and is also fine for audio streaming. Whether it’s okay for video
streaming depends a lot on how the video was encoded and how big the file
is. The larger the file size for the same amount of running time, the larger the
bandwidth that’s required to transmit it for steady video performance. As a
result, people tend to talk about 802.11g and 802.11a protocols for video
simply because a lot of available bandwidth exists for any problems that
might occur when sending the data over the airwaves.
In general, here are four generic ways that you can wirelessly enable your A/V
system, each somewhat dependent upon where the source content resides.
Getting to the (access) point
Your wireless signal degrades the farther that
you get from your access point, regardless of
which protocol you’re using. Thus, you might
have a great signal near your AP, a pretty good
signal 30–50 feet away, and an increasingly
poorer signal as you get farther and farther
away. The quality of signal isn’t measured just
in speed but also in the strength of the signal so
that the data packets — whether carrying
voice, data, video, audio, or whatever — are
received and understood the first time by the
recipient. (Check out Chapters 4 and 5 for more
info about choosing an AP and where to place
it in your home for best performance.)
There’s no good absolute definition of what
constitutes a good-quality signal; but for our
purposes here, it means that the signal is consistent
(not varying up and down), and it has at
least enough throughput to be able to match the
bandwidth of the source signal. So if you’re
streaming a 196 Kbps MP3 file, you want to
make sure that you at least have that much
throughput available on a consistent basis for
that streaming file. In most instances, when
streaming content from the Internet, your wireless
network speeds will exceed that of your
Internet connection, so your wireless connection
probably won’t be the bottleneck.
Buy wirelessly functional equipment. Some gear comes with wireless
inboard. For example, Motorola makes the simplefi (www.motorola.
com/simplefi), which is a wireless, digital audio receiver that enables
you to stream audio from your PC or the Internet (through your broadband
connection) directly to your home stereo. You just need to provide
such equipment with the right Service Set Identifier (SSID) and Wired
Equivalent Privacy (WEP) settings, and it’s on your home wireless network.
(Chapters 6, 7, and 8 cover SSID; Chapter 10 has the scoop on WEP.)
This typically gives the equipment access to the Internet and users
remote access to the device itself over these Internet connections. (In
the next section, we introduce you to some of the ways that present
entertainment gear is getting wirelessly enabled.)
Buy a wireless adapter or bridge. Some A/V equipment is network
enabled (meaning that it has some basic network interface capability
such as an Ethernet or a Universal Serial Bus [USB] port) but lacks wireless
functionality. In these instances, you can buy a wireless adapter to
interface with that port to get the device on the home network. These
typically have RCA jacks on one end of the wireless connection and
Ethernet connections on the other. A wireless bridge is a perfect way to
get it online. Gaming equipment, which we cover in detail in Chapter 12,
commonly has an Ethernet port but no wireless capability; wireless
bridges are perfect to allow multiplayer gaming over the Internet.
Shortly, we talk about the range of wireless adapters and bridges available
for the home user.
The simplefi and HomeRF
The current version of the simplefi uses a
system called HomeRF, which was a competitor
to 802.11. HomeRF is now defunct, and Motorola
will be soon converting the simplefi to 802.11.
If you’re shopping for a simplefi, make sure that
you get one of these newer versions, which
should be on the market by mid-2003.
If the source content resides in the personal computing center:
Buy a wireless media player. Some A/V gear is complemented by a
media player whose main goal is to coordinate the flow of audio, video,
and other data between the PC/Internet environment and the entertainment
system. A good example of this is the $249 PRISMIQ MediaPlayer
(www.prismiq.com), which sits atop any television, stereo, or entertainment
center and links to any computer via a wireless home network (or
other Ethernet connection). It eliminates the requirement to be physically
present at the PC in order to experience digital movies, MP3 audio,
and digital pictures stored on the PC. The PRISMIQ MediaPlayer also
connects to the Internet through the home network for relaxed, TVbased
Web surfing, instant messaging, personalized TV-displayed news,
and easy access to emerging next-generation broadband services. We
introduce you to some of the leading media players on the market in a
few moments.
Buy a home theater PC. A high-powered PC designed to interact with
the entertainment center is a perfect complement to your home. Instead
of spending money on a new DVD player, why not use that CD/DVD
player in your PC? In place of a bunch of home-created CDs, why not just
leave them on a high-capacity hard drive on your PC and let the songs
play through your stereo whenever you want? We talk about the home
theater PC shortly.