
Om Malik has an article at MIT Technology Review, Wi-Fi Goes Hi-Fi, about my latest passion, as any regular reader will know.
“Networked audio players are going to be the killer app of this year,” says Tim Shaughnessy, director of solutions marketing and alliances at Netgear in Santa Clara, CA. Like rival Linksys, Netgear has plans to launch one of these network audio players later this year. However, rivals such as Prismiq of Santa Barbara, CA, are going one step further: they are enhancing their devices with video-streaming features.
Prismiq’s MediaPlayer is a Linux-based device that resembles a DVD player and is designed to connect to a television or home entertainment system using standard audio-video cables; a Wi-Fi card connects MediaPlayer to a PC. The company is negotiating partnerships with consumer electronics manufacturers.
Prismiq’s CEO, Ken Goldsholl, believes that initially most consumers will use such devices to stream music. The widely used 802.11b wireless standard, which transmits data at 11 megabits per second, is not fast enough for streaming video. But as the 54 megabit-per-second Wi-Fi versions-802.11a and 802.11g-make their way into the market, video streaming will become a viable option.
Last Friday I couldn’t wait for this type of device any longer. I worked on my P.C. that had been stuck in the corner of the study since I bought my PowerBook. It has an Asus 7100 GeForce2 MX with a T.V. receiver onboard, 1GHz AMD CPU, Soundblaster 128 sound card, DVD, CDRW and a couple of disk drives. I updated some applications for recording TV on XP, and almost got it working. I still haven’t got the sound from the TV receiver, which I’m sure is a driver issue, but I figure it is just a proof of concept. I then rammed, literally, the stripped case (see image, and click for close-up) into my T.V. cabinet in the lounge room. It’s not bad, with 800×600 resolution the UI is a bit hard to see but it’s great for recording video.
The next step is to add a Wi-Fi PCI card, and start streaming the MP3s I have on the PowerBook. The added advantage will be Internet on the TV, for which I will then add either an infrared or wireless keyboard and mouse.
If I can’t get the audio going under XP, I have Freevo up my sleeve. In all honesty it may be a better option. Here in Oz we don’t have Tivo, and I love the idea of downloading a TV program and selecting the programs I’d like to record.