Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Chapter 12: Networking Your Entertainment Center
Cutting the cord in your home theater
This chapter focuses on the wireless equipment
used to distribute audio (or video) from one part
of your home to another — for example, taking
music from your PC to a stereo in another room.
Another place where we are starting to see
wireless systems become an option is in the
home theater. Home theaters are great (we
wrote Home Theaters For Dummies because
we love them so much), but they’re also a lot of
work — getting the wires around the room for
five to seven surround-sound speakers and a
flat panel TV on the wall is not always easy. To
date, wireless speakers have not always been
as good (in terms of sound performance) as
wired speakers, and most systems required a
mix of wired (in front) and wireless speakers (in
the back of the room). At the 2008 Consumer
Electronics Show, a company called Neosonik
(www.neosonik.com) announced a new wireless
home theater solution that provides
wireless connections for all five speakers and
a wireless video connection for an HDTV.
A number of other companies announced wireless
HDMI (high definition multimedia interface)
solutions that replace the digital video cables
used to connect HDTVs to source components
such as cable or satellite TV set-top boxes. If you
have a flat-panel TV (plasma or LCD) on the wall,
or a projection system mounted to your ceiling,
the last thing you want to do is deal with hiding
the cables that bring the picture into your TV
system. With these wireless HDMI systems —
from vendors such as Belkin (www.belkin.com)
and Gefen (www.gefen.com) — you can go wire
free and still enjoy a full-quality HDTV picture!
What should you look for when choosing a media adapter or player? We think
the following things are important:
� Network compatibility and performance: Any media adapter or player
you choose should be Wi-Fi certified and support at least 802.11g. If
you’re choosing a system that supports video as well, we strongly recommend
that you choose an 802.11n system. You may also consider
choosing a system certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance to support the WMM
quality of service standard. See the sidebar titled “Understanding Wi-Fi
Multimedia (WMM)” for more on this. Finally, you should ensure that
your adapter or player supports the Wi-Fi security system you’re using
on your network. (We recommend that you use WPA2.)
Even if your requirements are for audio only, if your AP or wireless router
uses 802.11n, you should choose an 802.11n media player or adapter
simply because mixing 802.11g and 802.11n on the same network
decreases the overall speed of the network. Keep your network all n to
maximize throughput for any use of the network.
� Software requirements: Most media adapters and players require the
installation of software on your PC or Mac. This software acts like
Windows Media Player or iTunes does on your computer, and indexes
all the media on your computer and streams (or forwards) it to your
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