RJ45: Digital living in a networked world
After a slow start, consumer electronics and IT are finally learning to coexist in the home through a wide range of surprisingly networked products.
The good old RJ45 connection is appearing on more and more items of consumer electronics equipment.
Some home theatre receivers have employed it in recent years. So have a couple of HDTV receivers. Of course, the Xbox 360 and the Sony PlayStation 3 have them too.
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What has startled me recently, though, was seeing them on three TVs.
The first was the Philips Cineos (42PFL9703) LCD set, which I saw for the first time in August 2008.
It wasn’t just that the TV had an RJ45 socket – that kind of thing was sometimes used as a service port.
What was special was that this connection was implemented for standard Ethernet networking, and it allowed the TV to directly access multimedia content from the computers on my home computer network – not just music, but also movies and photos.
Philips has recently decided to pull out of the Australian TV market. But since then I’ve also seen high-end TVs from Samsung (the LA46A950 LCD) and Pioneer (the Kuro PDP-LX609A plasma) with this feature.
In my opinion, such a provision on TVs is not likely to be much of a goer. They don’t really seem like the centre-piece of a network-centric home theatre system. But it does serve to illustrate that the multimedia content on computers is rapidly becoming available on the consumer electronics in the home.
Although wireless networks are very useful, the sheer volume of data involved in digital multimedia – especially when it comes to high-definition video – makes wired networks preferable.
Not all approaches work in the same way, as we will get to in a moment.
First, though, we must consider the USB port, which appears on many TVs and most high-end home theatre receivers. These provide an opening to an incredible wealth of conveniently accessible sound.
Consider: you can still buy a music server with a large hard disk drive, which can be filled with the contents of thousands of CDs. These costs thousands of dollars.
But with a home theatre receiver that has a suitable USB port you can simply add a terabyte USB hard disk drive for a couple of hundred dollars. Plug it first into a computer and fill it with music, and you have a cut-price music server.
Not so long ago you had to make do with lossy compression formats, such as MP3 or WMA, for music server use. The reason was space.
But a terabyte hard disk drive can hold the contents of two thousand CDs, held in uncompressed WAV format. The sound is absolutely identical to that of the original CD.
It’s likely that newer generations of home theatre receivers will support lossless compression systems, and it is certain that external hard disk drives will just get bigger, so this low-cost capacity is destined to increase.
These receivers make all this material useable thanks to on-screen displays and menu structures showing the music by album, artist, and so on. Plug the drive into a computer and you can load it with the contents of those thousands of ripped CDs, so long as the trouble was taken to set the ripping software to draw on a suitable CD database during the ripping process.
All that is very hands on, so I expect Ethernet to come to dominate.
Home theatre receivers that incorporate these capabilities tend to be (understandably) audio-centric. At the moment, few allow the display of still images or video from network sources – it’s music only.
But many models trump USB by providing access to Internet radio stations. For example, I am using Yamaha’s RX-V3900 home theatre receiver, which reports that I have access to 215 Internet radio stations based in Australia alone.
The list isn’t brave enough to say ‘All Stations’ for the United States when there are 430 available just for California. Right now I am listening to Baroque Musick in Windows Media Audio format, originating in that US State.
Goodness me, I can even listen in to two radio stations in Guam.
These are all selected by name, just by navigating through the receiver’s menu system. The receiver automatically set itself up for the network the first time it was switched on. These features are not just becoming available; they are becoming easy.
Two models are employed for providing multimedia access. The leading model is that promoted by the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), a group of consumer electronics and computer companies that promote connectivity between the two areas of electronics.
This is a server-driven model, in which the server was originally Windows Media Connect. However, since Windows Media Player 11, the ubiquitous built-in media player has provided this.
In essence, Windows Media Player organises the media to be provided to DLNA (or similar) devices plugged into the network.
On first connection, the Windows computer will demand permission for the device to be provided access, but this is granted with a click. Thereupon all the available media (and accessibility aids, such as playlists) can be drawn on by the device, subject only to its own capabilities. Most devices are limited to music.
Most of the main brands are using this server-based model for providing network access to multimedia material.
The other model, which is used by a smaller number of devices, is more akin to how a conventional computer network functions – the device simply has access to any and all ‘shared’ folders on all other devices in the network.
Files for playback are located by navigating through the folder hierarchy and selecting particular ones for playback.
An example of this is the Beyonwiz range of high-definition personal video recorders. These, and similar devices, support a much wider range of multimedia material – particularly video file formats and photos – than the server model.
The usefulness of the external hard drive is not limited to an external USB hard drive connected to a home theatre receiver. Network-attached storage (NAS) offers the same advantages, along with easier management.
NAS is a device that includes one or more bays for hard disk drives and sufficient processing in support to allow those hard disks to serve multimedia files to the network.
It is a cheap way of adding shared storage to a network. And because it is on the network the whole time, it is easy to maintain (you simply copy multimedia files to folders on the NAS), and accessible to all devices on the network.
So it can be easily loaded up with thousands of CDs of high-quality uncompressed, or losslessly compressed, music, along with other multimedia content.
Different devices then have full access to this content, regardless of the access model they use.
Once a network connection appears on the device, its potential uses seem endless.
For example, just about all new Blu-ray players have Ethernet ports in order to support BD-Live functionality. This allows them to download additional movie-related material from the Internet.
But several models also provide for their firmware to be downloaded and updated from the Internet using this (as, indeed, did HD DVD players from the start).
Finally, some models of home theatre receiver have built-in interactive web pages. Just enter their network address in a web browser of any computer attached to the network, and up comes a control screen for the receiver. Some models even allow a receiver’s full settings to be backed up to a computer.
For the time being, I’ve decided to steer clear of specific predictions about what new capabilities may be introduced to our consumer electronics equipment.
But I do predict that whatever the future brings for consumer electronics and IT in the home, it will be interesting and surprising.
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