Warp-Speed Wireless

Still Waiting for 11g-Rated Movies

About a year ago, PC makers began selling systems that offer TV tuning and recording functions, in addition to the PC's standard ability to play music and display photos. But in many households, the PC lives in a different room from the TV, so getting the content stored on the PC over to the TV is difficult. In response, companies such as HP and Linksys have introduced wireless devices that pull content from a PC in another room and deliver it to a television. The first generation of such products has been limited mostly to retrieving music or photos, as 802.11b networking is too slow for delivering full-motion video and 802.11a is too limited in range for a large house.

Promising the speed of 802.11a and the range of 802.11b, 802.11g networking brings users much closer to wireless video streaming, but it still can't rival the quality of a wired connection. We tested our Best Buy 802.11g kit from Netgear with the $250 Prismiq MediaPlayer--a set-top receiver with an ethernet port for wired connections and a PC Card slot for wireless adapters. (The Netgear WG511 is one of the wireless cards that Prismiq recommends for the MediaPlayer.) We connected the device to a television via an S-Video port and RCA stereo jacks.

We first attached both the MediaPlayer and a PC to the Netgear router via ethernet cables; in the video window of the Prismiq interface, we saw a perfect reproduction of our video clip, a medium-quality MPEG-4-encoded trailer from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. (We would have used the actual DVD of the movie, but the Prismiq doesn't support DVD streaming; doing so over ethernet is illegal.) The quality was almost as good when we switched the Prismiq to a wireless connection (with the PC still connected by wire), though we noticed a few jumpy video frames and an occasional gurgling sound in the audio. When we also switched the PC to a wireless connection, the audio glitches increased and the video occasionally broke down into a jumble of colored blocks. The video was barely viewable when we dropped to 11b speeds by switching to the D-Link DI-714P+ router.

We certainly saw an improvement with 802.11g as opposed to 802.11b, but not enough to make us believers in wireless video streaming (even for video of less-than-DVD quality). However, video streaming may improve with the introduction in mid-2004 of 802.11e, a so-called quality-of-service wireless standard intended especially to ensure a smoother flow of data for streaming audio and video.

The extra capacity of today's 802.11g did completely eliminate the glitches we occasionally heard when streaming music to the Prismiq over 802.11b. So if you're happy with the video offerings in your living room but you'd like to pipe in music from PCs farther afield, 11g hits the right note.