Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Chapter 12: Networking Your Entertainment Center
� DRM support: DRM (or digital rights management) is a blanket term to
describe various copy protection and usage restriction systems used by
online music and video stores to control how customers use music and
videos that they download or purchase. DRM is, at its essence, an effort
to keep digital music and video downloads off the Internet and off filesharing
services (such as peer-to-peer networks). Unfortunately for consumers,
most DRM is overly restrictive and makes it hard to distribute
your purchased music and video not only to strangers over the Internet
but also to yourself over your home network. If a lot of the music and
video that you have on your computers is from an online store, check
carefully to see whether your media adapter or player can support the
variant of DRM that the store uses — oftentimes the answer is no. We
talk more about this in the section titled “Internet Content for Your
Media Adapters, Players, and HTPCs” at the end of this chapter.
� Support for Internet Services: Although most music and video obtained
online is downloaded to a PC and stored there for future playback, some
online services support a streaming model (often called a subscription
service). With these services (an example is Rhapsody, www.rhapsody.
com), you don’t actually own a song or album, but you can access any
of millions of songs on demand (as long as your subscription is current).
Some media adapters and players allow you to directly access these services,
so you can completely bypass your computer and listen to (or
watch) this online content through your wireless network and broadband
Internet connection.
In addition to subscription services such as Rhapsody, hundreds of
Internet radio stations play their own chosen music playlists (like traditional
radio stations). You can’t choose which songs to listen to with
Internet radio (like you can with a subscription service), but you don’t
have to pay anything either. Many media adapters and players can tune
into Internet radio stations — without requiring you to use your computer
to tune in.
� Outputs: Remember again that media adapters and players are designed
to sit in between your computer(s) and your audio/video gear and to
covert digital music and video files into a format that your A/V gear can
understand. To connect your adapter or player to that A/V gear, you’ll
need to use some standard audio/video cables. As a baseline, you should
expect your adapter/player to have a stereo pair of analog audio outputs
(RCA cables, just like the ones that connect DVD players, tape decks,
and the like). More advanced models have digital audio outputs (TOSLINK
or coaxial) for connecting to a home theater receiver. On the video side,
at a minimum you should have a composite video connection (the yellow
video cable found on VCRs). If you want to get a high-definition picture
from your adapter or player, you should expect to find either a set of
analog component video outputs (three cables, like the ones found on
many DVD players) or an HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface)
digital video connector. (HDMI can actually carry both video and digital
audio on one cable.)
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