Where No Network Has Gone Before…

All of a sudden, all sorts of electronics need to access the internet and they are nowhere near my network. I didn’t hard-wire my living room for ethernet. My media pc is wireless and I never foresaw the need. Now I need multiple net connections and I don’t want to tear the walls open again.

First - here’s why I suddenly need new network connections:

My DirecTV dvr downloads “on demand” programming  over the internet and needs a high-speed connecion using an ethernet cable. Of course, even though it has a USB port, it won’t take a USB wireless adapter. (By the way, a quick note to the folks at DirecTV - “on demand” means “give it to me when I ask for it”. It doesn’t mean “give it to me after I ask for it, put it in the queue and download it to my dvr”.)

I’m shopping for a new Blu-Ray player. I’d waited out the format wars and the first generation technical glitches, but I’m ready. Quite a few of the newer models have network jacks to enable firmware upgrades directly from the internet - a pretty good idea, so I’d like to be able to take advantage.

I’m also looking at adding a Slingbox to the mix. It’s not that I have a driving need to access my dvr while I’m on vacation. I’ve got a close friend whose job has taken him to Asia for the next 3 years, and he’s jonesing for his Florida Gators and his favorite TV shows as the new season begins. I figured a Slingbox help him stay in touch. And of course a Slingbox will require a connection to the Internet.

So I went looking for a solution that would bring the network to my living room at a minimal cost and with minimal effort. My first thought was a concept I’d been making fun of for ages - powerline networking. Quite simply, a powerline network has (at least) 2 adapters that you plug into an electrical outlet. One gets plugged in near the router and connects to the router with an ethernet cable. The second adapter gets plugged in (in my case) to an outlet in the living room, near my home theater equipment. Again, from there, ethernet cables connect the devices to the adapter. The model I bought had jacks for 4 simultaneous connections. Score! Yeah. Right…

A few problems. The manufacturer warns against using power strips, surge protectors, extension cords, etc. There isn’t an empty wal socket within 30 feet. But I juggled and daisy-chained until I could free one up. Unfortunately, the circuit that my home thearter is on has been split, fragmented and expanded so often that getting a network connection to that wall was never going to happen. But I’ll keep the adapters. When my refrigerator requires net access, this will be an elegant solution.

Next stop was to go wireless. There are a variety of wireless bridges out there and their function is exactly what I needed. The bridge grabs the wireless signal and lets you connect a through an ethernet cable. The problem was that every one I looked at had one output and I wanted to connect at least 3 devices. I considered adding a router that would connect to the bridge and then distribute, but that seemed wasteful. There had to be a better way. And then I found it - The D-Link DAP1522 4-Port GigaBit Wireless Bridge/Access Point, a handy little device that lets me connect up to 4 devices to my wireless network. So my 3 new toys will get their access and I still have room for one more, if my couch ever needsthe Internet.

Digital Music

I have a huge digital music collection. When I say huge, I’m talking about over 120 gigs of music - close to 30,000 songs.  (And for you record execs out there - it’s all legal, as the many cartons of CD’s in my garage can attest to) I consume digital music in every imaginable way. As I write this, I’m listening to a playlist of songs on my computer. I have an iPod Shuffle for the gym - the old one that looks like a pack of gum. My 80gb iPod is bursting at the seams with music and videos. (One day soon, I’ll tell you and Steve Jobs why iTunes sucks.) One of my cars has a 6 disc changer filled with mixed CD’s I burned, while the other plays mp3 CD’s.

The one sticking point has always been my home audio system. I wanted to be able to play my digital music without having to burn it to CD’s. It seemed like a wasted step and certainly limited the way I could access and play the music I wanted to hear. And then came the first wave of wireless media players - home audio components that accessed your computer over your wi-fi network. Score! Or so I thought…

My first entry to this was the D-Link DSM 320. I installed the software on my PC. Got the player configured on my network. And then started importing the music library into the “database”. It choked on the size of the library. I scaled back and decided to just import my list of playlists. It had a nice feature that imported all the listed songs when you imported a playlist. That worked fine until I added the playlist that pushed me back over the limit. They finally released a software update that resolved that. Connectivity, though, was always a 50-50 proposition at best, and when they released firmware that would have fixed that, my unit refused to upgrade and D-link’s tech support couldn’t help.

Then I saw the Go Video Wireless Media/DVD player, which seemed pretty cool during the month that it worked. Then it refused to connect to the network (and GoVideo has no real support) At least it played DVD’s for another few months - just enough for the warranty to run out.

It was time to give up. If I wanted digital music (and video, etc) on my home entertainment system, there was only one reliable way to get it there. I bought a cheap low-profile PC (kind of like this one) that would fit in the console like an audio component - upgraded the sound and video cards, plugged the video into the dvi input of my HDTV, audio into the receiver, and FINALLY got what I wanted. Plus, now I have high-speed internet on the home theater system and can surf the web and show streaming video on my HDTV. And some of it (like ABC’s HD streams of Lost) actually look great on the big screen. But we’ll get to that…