Noise

by Alan Sheckter
Summer/Fall 2002

Living Room Harmony
The Harmony Universal Remote from Easy Zapper Inc. can control all of your home entertainment devices, including your TV, VCR and radio, as well as your DVD, CD and MP3 players.

The Harmony Remote offers quite a bit of brainpower. Smart State technology analyzes the state of your home entertainment system at any given time (which components are off and which are on), and then sends the appropriate operating commands to accommodate your wishes.

Some of the Harmony Remote's "knowledge" also comes from its connection to the Internet. The remote comes equipped with a USB port for downloading things such as TV program listings, CD song titles and cooking show recipes.

The $199 remote comes with a USB interface cable, an instruction manual and three AAA batteries.

Microsoft Unveils 'Freestyle' and 'Mira' Home PC Experiences
After years in the planning and prototype stages, Microsoft recently previewed a double dose of new home networking technologies. Dubbed "Freestyle" and "Mira," these technologies aspire to widen the scope of how consumers can access their music, videos and photos.

Freestyle, Microsoft predicts, will help take away the ball and chain that ties users to their desktops. Freestyle will offer a user interface that should permit consumers to remotely access their entire electronic entertainment collection from anywhere in a room. It also boasts the ability to deliver new TV experiences on the PC. Freestyle will give users the ability to search for TV shows, and then watch, pause or record them. Consumers will then have the power to edit, manage and store their media on their PCs.

Working with major PC manufacturers, Microsoft is helping design PCs optimized for Windows XP and Freestyle and said consumers can expect more details and availability news later this year.

Mira may kick-start a wireless trend in which consumers can enjoy their Windows XP experience Web browsing, music enjoyment, e-mail messaging and displaying digital images from anywhere in the home. Using XP's and CE .NET's wireless networking features, Mira will support wireless touch-screen monitors.

Microsoft expects Mira to be released later this year, and hopes its matching devices will be ready for the 2002 holiday season.

Rio Central:
Deluxe Living Room MP3 SystemSONICblue's Rio Central advanced digital audio center targets the most demanding MP3 enthusiasts. The $1,500 box, which requires no PC, is designed for the living room and enables music lovers to store more than 650 CDs of material on its 40GB hard drive. It's also a music manager with a large display, offering consumers the ability to not only store and play CDs and digital music files, but to create unlimited playlists and transfer music from a PC (via a USB or network connection). The USB port also enables users to share music with portable players.

In addition, Rio Central's CD-RW drive allows users to burn CDs. A built-in 56KB modem can retrieve information from the Internet.

A FireBall of Digital Music
The Escient Convergence Corp.'s FireBall music system acts as a CD, MP3 and Internet music player, server and controller.

The unit, which comes with a built-in modem and 50-plus button remote, houses a 40GB hard drive, large enough to hold approximately 700 hours of music at 128Kbps, according to Escient. In addition, the FireBall allows you to convert discs from your CD changer into MP3 digital files, as well as burn digital files into physical CDs on its CD-R/RW drive. You can also, via its USB port, download music from the FireBall to portable MP3 players.

FireBall also provides direct access to Internet radio, music-recognition services and periodic software upgrades. It comes with an MSRP of $1,999.

Turn Your PC into a DVD Authoring PVR
Pinnacle's Bungee DVD set-top device aligns your PC and television, bringing digital video functionality to the living room. Via a USB connection, Bungee DVD turns your PC into a personal video recorder (DVD burner not included), allowing you to record your favorite programs, then burn them to a recordable DVD or CD drive. In addition to capturing and saving programming to your PC's hard drive, you can also watch live TV on your computer. Other PVR functionality includes the ability to pause live TV.

Bungee DVD, widely available in Germany, is being test marketed for the first six months of 2002 at CompUSA stores in the United States. It sells for $299. At press time, a determination had yet to be made whether Bungee DVD would hit the American market at-large.

OpenGlobe Expands Home Entertainment Horizons
The OpenGlobe Entertainment Service brings previously PC-only convergence technologies to your living room sofa. The system, embedded in a number of home entertainment devices, gives users Internet radio access, as well as in-depth behind the scenes information about their music and movie collections.

Pressing the OG (OpenGlobe) button on the device's remote control gives you access, via a weekly-updated Internet site, to comprehensive music and movie information, including discographies, biographies and artist spotlights.

OpenGlobe-enabled devices include Compaq's iPAQ Music Center, Escient's FireBall and Kenwood's Sovereign Entré.

Do It Yourself PVR?
German techno-enthusiast Klaus Schmidinger's Web site offers a way to build a better mousetrap. Brushing aside ReplayTV and TiVo, the industry's two biggest personal video recorder companies, Schmidinger's site details the software, hardware and most importantly, the source code and drivers necessary to construct a do-it-yourself digital satellite receiver and video disk recorder.

His project describes how to build your unit, which is designed to run on a Linux operating system.

While Smart TV & Sound's editors have not attempted the project, and can't offer our endorsement, we salute Schmidinger's gumption. And, if any Smart TV & Sound readers successfully carry out this project, please let us know. For more information, go to www.cadsoft.de/people/kls/vdr/index.htm.