Future Gear: PC on the HiFi, and the TV

Today's high-power PCs can serve as complete entertainment centers--playing CDs, DVDs, and compressed digital music; doubling as TVs and video recorders; and blasting out high-end video game graphics. But they also run spreadsheets, e-mail clients, and database programs. While this versatility is what makes PCs so wonderful, people shopping for entertainment devices don't want to mix business with pleasure. They want to banish the work to the home office while they watch movies in the family room; and they don't want calendar reminders popping up on screen while they are watching movies.

Enter wireless networks, which promise to bring all your digital entertainment into the TV room while keeping the PC out. Just as the furnace and hot water heater pump their content through the house via ducts and pipes, the PC can, in theory, pump its goodies through the air (an idea I considered in last August's column). This notion appeared to be a newfound religion--with plenty of converts--at this month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. By my count, eight companies introduced some type of digital media receiver that grabs content from a PC and channels it to a TV or stereo system; and more companies are likely to join them. Prices range from about $100 to $300. Most products should go on sale in the next six months, at which time we'll see how many people have the patience to make them work.

The Air Isn't Clear

Almost all of the new receivers include Ethernet ports for connection to wired networks. But no one cares about that, of course. If we did, many more of us would have already dragged cables through the house or bought home phone line or power line network adapters. The fact is, wires are not cool--but wireless networking has its problems.

One problem is bandwidth: The currently dominant PC wireless standard, 802.11b, with a maximum throughput of 11 megabits per second (and often 5 mbps or less), is not reliable enough to transmit high-quality video. Although some companies, such as Prismiq, market their 802.11b receivers for lower-bit-rate video like video CDs, the first wireless devices mostly grab audio from PCs, and some also display photos.

Displaying photos is a prominent feature on the Digital Media Receiver 5000 from Hewlett-Packard, which also makes digital cameras and photo printers. It displays .jpg, .gif, .bmp, and .png files, and allows you to rotate them, arrange them in a slide show, or send them to a printer. HP's black-and-silver set-top box comes with an infrared remote control and displays menu options on your TV for accessing photos and music.

But video, not music or photos, appears to be HP's real target. "These are just baby steps," Ameer Karim of HP's home products division told me when he demonstrated the receiver. He's already planning for the next-generation product, which will probably use the emerging 20+ mbps 802.11g wireless standard to stream video, possibly even of DVD quality. (Companies such as Actiontec and D-Link are now offering 802.11g wireless cards and access points, and Apple has integrated the technology on its new laptops and offers a new 802.11g base station called AirPort Extreme.)

But HP may be dreaming of video to the detriment of audio. While it handles MP3 and .wma music files, the 5000 doesn't support the high-quality .wav format found on music CDs. And it provides basic left and right analog outputs only, not the digital outputs that feed high-end stereo systems.

In contrast, a new company called Cd3o is focusing solely on music with its Network MP3 Players. Despite the name, the little silver boxes also support .wma and .wav formats, and the $249 model includes optical and coaxial SP/DIF outputs. The Cd3o receiver has an infrared remote control, but it doesn't hook up to a TV to display its menus. Instead, it talks you through them with a synthesized voice that, on my prerelease version, sounded like Max Headroom sucking Helium. The company says it will sound better in the shipping version.

Tangled Up Without Wires

For the most part, the receivers worked smoothly in the controlled environments in which I saw them demonstrated. Each vendor brought its own preconfigured wireless gateway and notebook PC, with the receiver already installed via the Universal Plug and Play feature in Windows XP. Transmission conditions were ideal, with the gateway, PC, and TV or stereo in the same room and no microwave ovens or 2.4-GHz cordless phones to interfere.

Wireless networking gets messier, however, when you try to set it up yourself. We already have an 802.11b access point at PC World headquarters, but when I tried to set up one of the media receivers I still had Microsoft software to contend with. Windows XP provides an illogically complex series of dialog boxes for configuring a wireless connection on a PC, and there are plenty of places to get lost--especially if you want to get on a network with Wired Equivalency Protocol security enabled. Without too much trouble, I found the box for entering my WEP key, but I had to dig around for a long time to specify that I wanted 128-bit encryption using a hexadecimal key. And I can't remember where I went to specify the wireless channel--a requirement for some access points.

I'm not an expert in wireless networking, but neither are many of the consumers that companies are targeting with these media receivers. At least I had the benefit of asking for help from some of our tech-savvy editors and IT staff, and even they had trouble navigating the Windows setup.

Talk of Windows reminds me of another problem with this new home entertainment vision: It requires PCs that function smoothly. Because PCs are so complex, they inevitably have more problems than devices like TVs or stereos. What happens when we wed the two types of products? Will people tolerate a TV that crashes, or a stereo that won't boot?

HP's Karim was right when he talked about baby steps. This first generation of media receivers is an interesting experiment in a system that may some day redefine our entertainment experience. But at first these devices may appeal only to hobbyists who have a PC-hardened sense of patience.