Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Chapter 12: Networking Your Entertainment Center
� Media players/servers: Media players or servers add storage to the mix.
Typically, these devices have a built-in hard drive that lets you locally
store entertainment content for playback, so you don’t have to rely as
much on the performance of your wireless network. Most media players
also will stream content from your computer network (and the Internet),
so you can think of them as a media adapter with a hard drive. Examples
include Apple’s AppleTV (www.apple.com/appletv), and D-Link’s Media-
Lounge players (such as the DSM-510, www.dlink.com/products/?sec=
0&pid=542).
There’s not a Ministry of Naming Esoteric Wireless Entertainment Gear
out there (if there was, we think it would be right next door to the
Ministry of Banning Common Household Items from Airplanes, but that’s
another story entirely!). What we mean by this statement is that not all
vendors use exactly the same terms we are using here to delineate the
difference between an adapter and a player/server. The bottom line is
that an adapter has no local storage and is a streaming-only device,
whereas a player/server has a hard drive and can work independently of
your PC’s hard drive (syncing the content and then playing it back whenever,
even when your spouse has the laptop at work).
� Media center extenders: A specialized category of media adapters/players,
media center extenders work specifically with Windows XP or Vista
computers running Microsoft’s Windows Media Center software. A media
center extender essentially replicates the Media Center user interface on
your TV and lets you access all the content stored on your Media Center
PC remotely. A media center extender may have a hard drive for local
content storage, but it is primarily a streaming solution, with the content
you’re accessing all coming from your Media Center PC. Examples here
include Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console (discussed in Chapter 11),
and the Linksys DMA 2100 Media Center Extender (www.linksys.com).
� Networked audio/video gear: Some audio/video gear has the networking
built right in. This could be a home theater receiver with networking
capabilities that let you stream audio from your computer directly into
the receiver (without requiring a stand-alone media adapter), or it could
be a purpose-built wireless entertainment system that uses Wi-Fi to distribute
audio (and to a lesser degree, video) around your home. A good
example of the former is Denon’s AVR-4308CI home theater receiver, with
built-in Wi-Fi (http://usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3494.asp); an example
of the latter is the Sonos Digital Music System (www.sonos.com),
which uses Wi-Fi to create a multiroom, whole-home audio distribution
system.
Most networked home theater receivers do not have built-in Wi-Fi but
instead provide only a wired Ethernet connection. You can use a Wi-Fi
Ethernet bridge, discussed later in the chapter, to connect these devices
to your wireless network.
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