Maximum PC Media Streaming RSS Feed

Cisco Director Wireless-N Music Player

Michael Brown — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:45:16 -0500

It's no Sonos (or Squeezebox, for that matter)

By launching a full line of music-streaming products, including the Director DMC250 reviewed here, Cisco clearly has the Sonos Digital Music System in its sights; unfortunately, it’s fallen well short of the target.

Our biggest complaint has to do with the convoluted setup process, which includes installing Cisco’s LELA (Linksys EasyLink Advisor) on at least one PC. LELA isn’t a bad utility—if you’re completely terrified by the prospect of setting up a home network. If you’re an old hand, it’s a waste of computer resources.

The default installation also forces you to set up a user account on Cisco’s website. A spokesperson tells us this is because Cisco needs to act as an intermediary between you and Rhapsody. Really? What if you already have an account with Rhapsody? What if you decide you don’t want anything to do with it? There’s apparently some way of installing the Cisco media server software without LELA or divulging your email address to Cisco, but the documentation doesn’t mention it.

Our second biggest complaint is that it takes the Director a mind-blowing 74 seconds to start up from the time you push its power button to the time it’s ready to play a note. That’s a full minute and 14 seconds. We’ve listened to songs that were shorter than a minute and 14 seconds. When we asked the product manager if our experience was typical, he sheepishly replied, “Yeah, we’re working on that.”

The Linksys Director comes with a good remote control, but you can also navigate its menus using the buttons arrayed around its display.

The Director has a luscious 3.5-inch display, so it’s too bad it won’t consistently display album art. Cisco’s media server insists on pulling album art from the AMG online database instead of simply looking in the album folder or parsing the track’s existing metadata. If your track’s metadata isn’t mapped exactly the way it is in AMG’s database, you’ll get placeholder art.

You can connect the Director to your network with or without an Ethernet cable (the device is outfitted with a dual-band 2.4/5.0GHz 802.11n radio but can fall back to 802.11b/g mode). There’s an integrated amp that puts 50 watts per channel into a four-ohm load or 40 watts per channel into an eight-ohm load. Cisco uses spring-loaded binding posts, so forget about using banana plugs.

We auditioned the amp playing Paul Thorn’s “Lucky Seven Ranch” through a pair of TBI Audio’s Majestic Diamond IR monitors and were not at all impressed. Low and midrange frequencies sounded as though they were passing through a wall of mud while the highs sounded paradoxically shrill. Very odd. We had a better experience when we used the Director’s line-level outputs to connect the player to TBI’s Millennia amp.

As with the Sonos system, you can also plug an analog source (a cassette deck or a turntable with an integrated pre-amp, for instance) into the Director and stream its audio over your network. You can also stream music from a host of free Internet radio stations (but not from LastFM, Pandora, or Slacker). Cisco does top Sonos in device connectivity: The Director is capable of hosting both a USB storage device and an iPod (using an optional dock).

SageTV HD Theater

Will Smith — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:10:22 -0500

This streaming box plays most files, if you use special software

Streaming boxes are a mixed bag these days. With super-polished commercial offerings like the AppleTV, as well as streaming functionality integrated in every other consumer electronics device—from the Xbox 360 to the TiVo—we thought the age of the dedicated streaming box had passed. However, the SageTV HD Theater offers something a little different than the typical UPNP or DLNA streaming box—but it’ll cost you.

Starting with the additional $80 for SageTV’s Media Center app, which should be a requirement for using the HD Theater. If you install the SageTV software on a PC equipped with an HDTV card, it turns that PC into a fully functional PVR, complete with an onscreen guide and basic scheduling functionality. SageTV’s Media Center is an acceptable PVR, offering more customizability than Windows Media Center and none of its annoying DRM, albeit in a less-polished product. The software’s 10-foot interface is incredibly customizable, but can be a little unwieldy and slow to browse, even when run on a fast PC.

The HD Theater effectively extends the capabilities of your SageTV Media Center to other rooms in your home. Connect the HD Theater to a wired network, and you’ll be able to stream recorded TV, live TV, music, movies, and photos from the host PC to the TV and/or stereo you have hooked up to the HD Theater. We were able to play our test files using many different video and audio codecs, without problems. While it was initially tricky to hit the file we were looking for when browsing large libraries using the remote, we eventually got the knack of it and were able to select the appropriate content without too many over- or under-shot menus. When paired with the SageTV Media Center, the HD Theater is a competent, if unpolished piece of hardware.

You can drop the HD Theater in your entertainment center, then stream everything from live TV to downloaded video to MP3s.

Without Media Center, though, you’re stuck with the stand-alone mode, which lets you stream content stored on standard network shares or UPNP servers. Unfortunately, the HD Theater doesn’t have the horsepower to work with large libraries. We also had problems streaming several common video types—including ones that worked when we viewed them through the SageTV Media Center. And if we thought the interface was slow when connected to the SageTV Media Center, it was positively pokey when in stand-alone mode.

The remote control is a fairly standard OEM design, similar to ones that ship with Media Center machines. It’s infrared only, meaning you must maintain line of sight to the extender. Button placement is OK, but as much as the SageTV software requires you to type things in, it would be beneficial to have a QWERTY keyboard accessible, instead of using the numeric pad.

For anyone who has already bought into the SageTV lifestyle, the HD Theater is a great way to connect more rooms to the media hub. However, we can’t recommend the HD Theater if you haven’t already purchased SageTV. We’d rather run the more-polished and less-fiddly TiVo PC software, and use inexpensive TiVo boxes to stream content throughout our home.

Gefen Wireless for HDMI UWB

Michael Brown — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:45:47 -0500

Wow! It actually works!

The fact that Gefen’s wireless HDMI extender works at all is remarkable enough; the fact that it works better than the manufacturer claims borders on the miraculous. So why aren’t we giving it a higher score? First, it would be cheaper to hire an electrician to install a hardwired HDMI connection; second, the extender is limited to HDMI 1.2a.

You can use HDMI 1.3 sources and cables, but the Ultra Wideband technology Gefen relies on just doesn’t have the bandwidth to accommodate losslessly compressed multitrack audio (Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio); it falls back instead to either Dolby Digital or DTS surround sound or simple stereo, depending on the source. The system can’t accommodate Deep Color (video with 30-, 36-, or 48-bit color depth) either, but it does support HDMI 1.3’s lip-sync feature.

If your home has masonry walls and ceilings, on the other hand, it might not be possible to create a new cable run. And if your A/V receiver and home-theater PC or Blu-ray player are on the same side of the room, and what you need is a means of getting video to your projector on the opposite side of the room, the audio issue won’t matter (neither will Deep Color, for that matter, if your projector or display doesn’t support it). In short, Gefen’s product is amazing, but its appeal is limited to a small circle of consumers, which is why the company has to charge so much for each unit.

The transmitter and receiver are fairly conspicuous, being housed in 6.75-inch-wide aluminum boxes with large fixed antennas.

The transmitter is equipped with two HDMI inputs, one component video input, one stereo input, and an IR blaster jack. The receiver has one HDMI output, one stereo output, and an IR extender jack. Plug Gefen’s $25 IR extender into this port and you can send commands from the receiver back to an emitter plugged into the transmitter to control A/V gear in the same cabinet. But the transmitter doesn’t have an IR receiver of its own, so the only way to switch inputs is to walk up to the device and push a button.

We tested the system by sending video from both a Blu-ray-equipped home-theater PC and a stand-alone Samsung Blu-ray player to an Epson PowerLite Cinema 500 mounted on the ceiling 15 feet away. Gefen recommends placing the transmitter and receiver as high as practical to prevent obstacles—including people walking past—from disrupting the signal, so we were surprised to discover that we could close the plywood door on our entertainment center without creating any issues at all. We sent the HDMI signal through a Sherwood RD-7503 A/V receiver first, so the fact that the Gefen unit doesn’t support Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA didn’t matter a bit.

The system operates on a frequency range between 3.1GHz and 4.8GHz, so we didn’t encounter any conflicts with either our dual-band router (which operates radios on the 2.4- and 5.0GHz frequency bands) or our DECT 6.0 cordless phone (which operates in the 1.9GHz range). The transmitter achieves its magic by compressing each video frame using the JPEG 2000 compression standard before zapping it through the air, but we were unable to detect any visual artifacts, dropped frames, or any appreciable difference when we compared its image quality to the hardwired HDMI connection we usually use.

Gefen’s HDMI extender is undeniably expensive, but it’s a remarkable technological achievement that delivers even better performance than its manufacturer advertises, so we can’t complain.

Western Digital TV HD Media Player

Michael Brown — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Western Digital’s WD TV HD Media Player is missing two components commonly found in digital media players: a display and storage. What the device does have is two USB ports, HDMI and composite video outputs, digital and analog audio outputs, and the ability to play almost any digital media.

Since you provide the storage media, you can never fill up the WD TV. You plug the player into your TV and connect your USB drive or digital camera to the player; it then creates thumbnails for all the digital movies, photographs, and music it finds stored there. If you connect storage devices to both USB ports, the WD TV will index the contents of both drives as if they were one.

The device delivers much higher video resolution than most media players, all the way from 480i using the composite video port to 1080p using HDMI (576p, 720i, 720p, and 1080i are also supported via HDMI). The WD TV supports a host of video formats, codecs, and containers, including AVI, H.264, QuickTime, VOB, and Matroska. It does not, however, support DivX.

The player supports most digital photo formats, including BMP, TIFF, PNG, and GIF at resolutions up to 2048x2048; JPEG is supported at resolutions up to 4096x4096. Video quality via HDMI is excellent. High-res photos stored on the 250GB WD Passport drive we used took an average of 3.7 seconds to appear on the screen, which is plenty fast for slideshows, but the device’s browser software is ploddingly slow about generating thumbnails. And while it can play slideshows while simultaneously streaming music, you can’t queue up the music and start both at the same time.

Speaking of music, the WD TV supports almost all the popular file and container formats, including AAC, FLAC, MP3, Ogg, and WAV. We do wish, however, that it supported WMA Lossless. The player displays album art and artist, album, and track name information stored in id3 tags, but it doesn’t inform you about the codec and bitrate used to encode the track. And it’s a good thing the player has an optical S/PDIF output, because it has an atrociously bad DAC.

The WD TV is a ripper-friendly solution for anyone who doesn’t have an HTPC, media-center extender, or other type of media streamer—and doesn’t want one. It’s also useful for taking media on the go (provided there’s something to connect it to when you get there).

Creative Wireless Receiver

Michael Brown — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:30:00 -0600

Creative takes another stab at wireless audio streaming with its Creative Wireless Receiver, an AC-powered, 4.0x2.75-inch block that you plug into powered speakers or your hi-fi system. The $70 device receives audio streams from a transmitter -- such as Creative’s Xmod Wireless or X-Fi Notebook card (purchased separately) -- that's connected to your PC.

For our tests, we used the Sound Blaster X-Fi Notebook ($90), plugging it into the ExpressCard slot in HP’s monster-sized Pavilion HDX9000 notebook PC. The combination sounded great—at close range, at least. We placed the notebook and the sound card in a bedroom and streamed music to several locations within a 2,700-square-foot single-family home.

Creative says the receiver (which operates on the 2.4GHz frequency band) has a range of 100 feet. That's a very optimistic claim. In our first tests, the receiver had no problems synching to a transmitter located inside a wooden entertainment center and streaming high-bit-rate MP3s, WMA Lossless tracks, and even WAV files. We experienced no signal drops, and the remote control was able to send commands to several different media players (including Creative’s Media Source and Windows Media Player) on the host PC.

The distance between the transmitter and receiver in this scenario is only about 12 feet, but it's important to note that our media room is a "room-within-a-room" design that, in the past, has proven very hostile to wireless devices. So kudos to Creative for making the connection. The receiver also performed well in the kitchen, which is about 28 feet from the transmitter with one wall in between.

But a 100-foot range? Not in our tests. Now, we weren’t surprised when the receiver couldn’t establish a connection when we moved it to the front porch (about 20 feet from the transmitter) because our media room is in between. But the receiver also couldn’t connect in the dining room (also 20 feet from the transmitter) or the laundry room (40 feet away). We had better luck on the back patio (18 feet away), but walking in front of the receiver was enough to cause dropouts. There’s no other way to say it: The range of the Wireless Receiver (and/or that of the X-Fi Notebook card) sucks.

The range issue is unfortunate, because there’s plenty that we like about this system, especially the 24-bit Crystalizer signal processing. It’s a relatively cheap system, too -- especially if you need to cover multiple zones.

Then again, zones don’t matter much if you can’t reach them in the first place.

Pinnacle PCTV HD Mini Stick

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 06:00:00 -0600

It’s been almost a year since we tested Pinnacle’s original PCTV HD Pro Stick TV tuner. In that time, Pinnacle has fixed many of the original product’s shortcomings. The new PCTV HD Mini Stick is even smaller than the original HD Pro Stick, which was itself the size of a fat USB memory key. You could easily chuck the 1”x0.5” PCTV HD Mini Stick in your bag and never notice it. The remote is also slimmed down considerably and could slip into your back pocket comfortably.

One thing Pinnacle didn’t change is the small telescopic whip antenna, which features a magnetic base. When we first raised concerns about putting a magnet in our laptop bag, where we usually have a portable hard drive also rattling around, Pinnacle said there was no reason to be alarmed: No one had ever reported the magnet scrambling any data. With the PCTV Mini Stick, Pinnacle has changed its story. A sticker on the base of the antenna now reads: “Warning, magnet, please keep away from credit cards, magnetic media, hard drives, and other objects sensitive to magnetic fields.” Gee, thanks guys. Of course, the lousy thing is that you can’t use the antenna without the base. If the company had designed the antenna so you could separate it from the base and clip it to something, there wouldn’t be any problem. The current design means you have to choose between the possibility of nuking your notebook PC’s hard drive or not packing the antenna.

We successfully installed and configured the PCTV HD Mini Stick on an older Core Duo dual-core notebook running Windows XP and tuned into about a dozen local ATSC digital stations. Image quality was good but, obviously, very dependent on the broadcast signal. Overall, the tuner ran fine but was a bit laggy on the notebook. We’d recommend the more current Penryn-class Core 2 Duo to run the tuner.

Part of the size savings likely comes from Pinnacle jettisoning support for analog broadcasts. The HD Mini Stick can handle ATSC digital terrestrial transmissions and unencrypted cable transmissions in the ClearQAM format. We dinged the original HD Pro Stick for not having ClearQAM, but we think it’s a bit premature to zap NTSC. Sure, the feds will turn the lights out on over-the-air NTSC, but cable companies continue to broadcast NTSC and many people will still hook up their PCs to the cable at home.

Sadly, that makes the PCTV HD Mini Stick of limited value. Yes, you can use it to watch ClearQAM digital broadcasts on cable, but ClearQAM support by cable providers is spotty. Even if you can receive your local major broadcasters in ClearQAM on cable, what if you want to watch CNN or the Cartoon Network? With the PCTV HD Mini Stick, you’re out of luck.

The PCTV HD Mini Stick is useful only for those who really want to watch digital TV using rabbit ears. Forgive us, but we’d rather shell out for a tuner that also gives us NTSC capability.

Sonos Bundle 150

Michael Brown — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:10:41 -0600

You know a product is uncommonly designed when each of its successors looks and functions pretty much like the original. Such is the case with the latest revamp of the Sonos multiroom audio system. All the latest changes are inside the product or the software or are related to third-party services linked to the product. But that doesn’t mean they’re insignificant.

The Sonos mesh network is independent of any other Wi-Fi network you might be operating, so you don’t need to worry about music clogging up the pipes of your data network. The new hardware is backward-compatible with older Sonos products: We merged the new ZP120 (the self-amplified model), the new ZP90 (the passive model), and a second controller into our existing Sonos network without a hitch.

We’ve always considered the amplified ZonePlayer to be the system’s weakest link, but the new ZonePlayer 120 does much to change our mind. It produces only 55 watts per channel (five more watts per channel than the original), but when paired with a set of high-quality speakers (we used TBI Audio Systems’s Diamond IRs), it more than adequately filled a small room with sound. There’s a subwoofer output if you crave more bottom end, and since the amp supports a 4-ohm load, you can connect two pairs of 8-ohm speakers. And we’re pleased to report that the spring-loaded binding posts now accommodate banana plugs.

The system still requires at least one module to be hard-wired to your network, but now that you can plop the ZoneBridge BR100 ($100) next to your router, you won’t feel as though you’re wasting a ZonePlayer just to achieve connectivity. The bridges are also handy in larger homes where the mesh network can’t quite reach every corner.

Support for FLAC and Apple Lossless has been added, but the system still can’t handle WMA Lossless. You can stream playlists from iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, and Rhapsody, but the system still can’t play DRM-protected iTunes tracks (is anyone still buying those?).

The system already makes it supremely easy to sample the riches of Internet radio, but Sonos is now in the midst of overhauling the software to incorporate elements of the RadioTime service, which helps you find Internet radio stations that suit your musical tastes (those changes weren’t finished in time for this review). And now Sonos owners get to enjoy free subscriptions to the music-discovery services Last.fm and Pandora (we’re not talking about free trials—the services are now free to Sonos customers).

At this point, the only way the Sonos controller could get any better is with a tricked-out multitouch interface reminiscent of Apple’s iPod and iPhone. Well, if you own one of those devices, you can now download a free utility from the App Store that renders it capable of controlling the Sonos system.

We consider the Sonos the gold standard in music streaming. But we do wish the company offered more bundle choices. Buying the ZP90, ZP120, and CR100 controller in this package provides a $250 discount over buying the pieces separately, but if you already have powered speakers and would prefer to have two ZP90s and a controller, you must buy the pieces a la carte—at a $100 premium over this bundle (money that would be better spent on a bridge—or music!).

ZeeVee Zv-100

Michael Brown — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:05:50 -0600

Plenty of boxes will stream video from your PC in one room to a TV in another, but they all have two things in common: You need to provide the network, and you need to buy one box for each TV you want to stream to. ZeeVee has a better idea: One Zv-100 will stream video from your PC to all your HDTVs by using your home’s existing coaxial wiring as a network.

But here are five limitations you should know about up front: First, the Zv-100 will stream only to digital TVs equipped with digital QAM tuners—it can’t stream video to a simple monitor or an analog television set. Second, ZeeVee does not currently recommend the Zv-100 for use in households with satellite TV service (only cable TV is supported). Third, the Zv-100 is limited to streaming video at 720p resolution. Fourth, the Zv-100’s $500 price tag is justified only if you’re interested in streaming to more than one HDTV. A media center extender is a much cheaper solution otherwise. And finally, the box takes over the host PC while streaming—the computer can’t be used for any other purpose during this time. Still interested?

The Zv-100 bundle consists of the fanless ZvBox (while we appreciate the silence, you can fry an egg on its surface while it’s in use), the ZvRemote (an RF/IR combo model that can control a PC anywhere in your house, plus up to three TVs), and the ZvReceiver (which sends and receives commands from the remote and relays them to your PC via USB).

The ZvBox captures your PC’s audio and video output (carried over USB and VGA cables, respectively), encodes it in real time to MPEG-2, and “broadcasts” it on a private channel on your coax network. When you tune your HDTVs’ QAM tuners to this channel, they receive this private broadcast. So while you can stream to multiple HDTVs, they’ll all receive the same content (which can be a problem if you want to watch Dexter but would prefer that your children watch something that won’t cause nightmares).

The RF remote enables you to control every aspect of your PC as if you were sitting in front of it. It’s extremely well designed, with the exception of one blunder: It has a notebook-style track pad that doesn’t recognize finger taps (left and right mouse buttons are placed beneath the track pad, which means you have to look at the remote to find them).

The remote has all the other buttons you’d expect, including transport (play, pause, fast forward, etc.), a telephone-style numeric keypad (for entering both numbers and letters), volume control, and so on. It even has keyboard-style arrow keys that make it very easy to scroll web pages. A large button in the center of the remote calls up a rudimentary 10-foot Zviewer interface (with preset links to sites such as Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, ABC, and a few others) that makes it easier to manage the system from your couch. Another button calls up Windows Media Center, if your version of Windows is so equipped.

The quality of the streamed video is excellent, but you’re completely dependent on your HDTV’s speakers when it comes to sound (unless your set has an audio output that you can connect to an A/V receiver or powered speakers). The fact that the ZvBox is limited to analog VGA (received from your PC and passed through to your monitor) is a major problem if your rig’s videocard has only one output (as many home-theater and notebook PCs do) because it compromises your desktop experience and prevents you from connecting a 30-inch LCD.

We’ve listed a lot of limitations in this review; if none of them bothers you, the Zv-100 is a great solution. With the exception of the satellite TV issue and the fact that the ZvBox takes over the host PC while streaming, we think the ZeeVee team has done just about everything possible to create a fabulous no-new-wires, multi-client video-streaming system at a reasonable price.