Wirelessly piping high-quality video and audio throughout your home can be a convoluted technical feat that often leads to fuzzy results. Belkin's $500 PureAV RemoteTV changes that by offering high-quality multimedia streaming that's a breeze to set up. The catch: Belkin's technology just may be breaking some copyright laws.
RemoteTV--which Belkin says will begin shipping in early November--lets you take content from a cable box, satellite receiver, digital video recorder, or DVD player and transmit it to a second TV.
The setup uses a proprietary 40-megabits-per-second, 5-GHz wireless technology the company says works at up to 350 feet. The package includes a transmitter and receiver (each with component video, S-Video, composite video, and analog audio jacks). You use your existing television and stereo remotes to control the system.
In my test of a preproduction RemoteTV system, setup took about 15 minutes, after which I streamed the DVD of
Playback quality was superb, with no perceptible degradation in audio or video. And the system proved remarkably adept at transmitting my remote control clicks from one room to the components in the other room.
The downside to this setup: Whatever is being viewed in the living room trumps what anyone else wants to watch. Plus, there's just no avoiding the fact that somebody has to load the DVD itself into the main unit.
Because of copyright laws, you can't legally stream a DVD from one device to another over a network without a license from the DVD Copy Control Association. Hollywood is worried that media files loose on a network could end up on the Internet. Belkin concedes it has no such blessing from the DVDCCA, but notes that RemoteTV's encryption prevents piracy.
Overall, I found the $500 RemoteTV to be a good, easy-to-use product. At that price, though, it may be cheaper to set up a DVD player in each room. But if you like the idea of streaming all your entertainment around the house, it's a good option.
Tom Spring, PC World
