Globetechnology: Amoisonic Net DVD Player
Now the market’s getting even more interesting. Amoisonic — a Chinese manufacturer that usually makes “white label” products for others to put their names on — has joined a small group of manufacturers that offer a wireless, networkable DVD player (Gateway and GoVideo both sell similar wireless DVD players).
DVD Benchmark
DVD players in this category were not reviewed under standard Benchmark conditions. This means there may not have been two people present to witness the results and a full set of tests may not have been performed. While we could just publish these results as standard reviews, we feel it is of benefit to our readership to make the results available in the DVD Benchmark database.
Chris Lanier’s Blog : My Thoughts on Xbox 360 Media Center Extenders
I have said in the past that I think the Xbox 360 will fail to be the product the general public wants if it doesn’t (in some way) support MPEG-4 decode. However, since I wrote that I figured out what Microsoft’s strategy is with not supporting MPEG-4 (DivX/XviD) on the Extenders. The idea will be to have the PC transcode the content to be DLNA Compliant. It’s required that a DNLA Compliant device must be able to decode MPEG-2 for video, LPCM for audio, and JPEG for pictures. However, WMV9 just happens to be an optional format for DNLA compliance. Current Extenders and the Xbox 360 support all of the above. So, the concept is that you will purchase an Intel Viiv-based PC that will transcode the content for you, and send it out onto the network. I would very much assume non-Viiv-based PC’s will also have a path to do this. I’ll be buying a Viiv-based PC for many reasons, however.
Gigabit Ethernet would have been nice to see, however it was most likely kicked to lower the overall price. If transcoding to WMV9 is the goal, 10/100 will be good enough. But, sending out a few MPEG-2 streams will start to slow the network down. Powering On/Off with the remote is also a welcomed feature.
HDTV support is welcomed and will include DVR-MS records and WMV-HD files. Once HDTV support is expanded upon, the Xbox 360 will also support those recordings. Along with HDTV support comes AC3 (Dolby Digital) and WMA Pro 5.1 support.
No Visualizations for music is to be expected in my opinion. That’s just too much unless data is send through the network with little gain. What would (will?) to be nice if Microsoft could tap into the visualizations that the Xbox 360 will have itself for playing back music. However, due to the architecture of the Extenders, I’m not sure that will happen.
I expect streaming of DVD’s to be an added feature around the time of Vista. Windows Media DRM 10 for Network Devices can and will provide this feature, just wait for it.
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Summerland by Michael Chabon
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
