Doom9
6th March 2009, 22:23
The amount of interesting stuff went down pretty much in line with the declining number of exhibitors..
I saw no optical drive hardware at all - neither any media manufacturers (which were aplenty in past years).
Many companies have their own 1080p media streamer nowadays - besides the various Taiwanese, Chinese and Korean manufacturers there's. Zyxel, Netgear and Haupauge. I didn't get the hardware specs except for the Haupauge (Sigma) but I guess the others will be Sigma based as well. And while I got a yes from Netgear when I asked about Blu-ray ISO playback, that yes came too fast if you ask me so I'll keep my doubts until I find a test somewhere that confirms this (most people mistake Blu-ray for M2TS playback.. but to me blu-ray support means menus and everything).
Of course, you need storage for those streamers, and NAS boxes were aplenty as well, though not many manufacturers really have heavy duty stuff that would permit storing your entire high def collection. I have a snapshot of an 8U storage rack though, and a 4U 2.5" rack that seem very interesting (don't bother asking for the price though.. it's way out of the league of home users).
Displayport is definitely not the big thing again as with most GFX cards you can consider yourself lucky to get HDMI (and those are usually limited to 1080p which sadens me and my 30" 2560x1600 screen).
Fanless netbooks are also to be found, I even found one with a dual core Atom, but none that combines the features I'm looking in a "daily use" machine: dual core, fanless and a GFX card that does high def content. So, no ion prototypes yet.
There's one interesting product from devolo that allows you to stream a DVB-S2 signal in your home network. You need a proprietary settop box which does the actual decoding and while dual sat should be okay, having multiple receivers isn't, so there's still some work to be done to get to the ideal solution (you definitely need multiple receivers, and I think some UPNP style streaming would be ideal.. as CES has shown that TVs that can handle streaming are coming.. alternatively, simply demodulating the DVB-S2 signal and putting it into a DVB-IPI might be interesting as well as I figure it's a matter of time until TVs can handle IP based DVB - even today there are cable settop boxes that include a cable modem so they can do streaming).
I saw no optical drive hardware at all - neither any media manufacturers (which were aplenty in past years).
Many companies have their own 1080p media streamer nowadays - besides the various Taiwanese, Chinese and Korean manufacturers there's. Zyxel, Netgear and Haupauge. I didn't get the hardware specs except for the Haupauge (Sigma) but I guess the others will be Sigma based as well. And while I got a yes from Netgear when I asked about Blu-ray ISO playback, that yes came too fast if you ask me so I'll keep my doubts until I find a test somewhere that confirms this (most people mistake Blu-ray for M2TS playback.. but to me blu-ray support means menus and everything).
Of course, you need storage for those streamers, and NAS boxes were aplenty as well, though not many manufacturers really have heavy duty stuff that would permit storing your entire high def collection. I have a snapshot of an 8U storage rack though, and a 4U 2.5" rack that seem very interesting (don't bother asking for the price though.. it's way out of the league of home users).
Displayport is definitely not the big thing again as with most GFX cards you can consider yourself lucky to get HDMI (and those are usually limited to 1080p which sadens me and my 30" 2560x1600 screen).
Fanless netbooks are also to be found, I even found one with a dual core Atom, but none that combines the features I'm looking in a "daily use" machine: dual core, fanless and a GFX card that does high def content. So, no ion prototypes yet.
There's one interesting product from devolo that allows you to stream a DVB-S2 signal in your home network. You need a proprietary settop box which does the actual decoding and while dual sat should be okay, having multiple receivers isn't, so there's still some work to be done to get to the ideal solution (you definitely need multiple receivers, and I think some UPNP style streaming would be ideal.. as CES has shown that TVs that can handle streaming are coming.. alternatively, simply demodulating the DVB-S2 signal and putting it into a DVB-IPI might be interesting as well as I figure it's a matter of time until TVs can handle IP based DVB - even today there are cable settop boxes that include a cable modem so they can do streaming).