Smart Home Blog

New standard of TV - Hight Definition Television needs a new universal interface between video source and TV. High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a good candidate to do it. HDMI is the first uncompressed all-digital interface that carries audio and video signals, and is backwards compatible with the video-only digital interface DVI. It was founded by major electronics manufacturers, including Hitachi, Philips, Sony, Toshiba and others in 2002. Since that time 3 version of the interface was released. Read more information in the article “HDMI: Past, Present, and Future” on Den Guru site. It might be useful to understanding a digital TV endency.

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Mediabolic announced a new conception of digital home based on the Yahoo! Digital Home Engine. The Yahoo! Digital Home Engine is a software module which can be installed on PC or a network-attached storage (NAS) product to give consumer electronics devices access to the media from the Yahoo! websites. Currently it’ll work in Japan only. But I think this conception will be expanded to the rest of the world if it’ll be success.

Currently Yahoo! Digital Home Engine covers only entertaiment area. Let’s see how it’ll be integrated with existing home automation systems.

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The new concept of satellite box will be presented in IBC show in Amsterdam this Friday. The LyngBox differs from the similar devices in the possibility to add new channels and update information of already added ones via Internet. The LyngBox uses the authoritative LyngSat website to retrieve channels data. It receive DVB-S2 and well as terrestrial DVB-T signals, and supports HDTV (720p and 1080i), H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and MPEG-2, 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios. Aditionally, the LyngBox has a 160GB drive to turn this unit into a PVR as well.

The aviability and price are not known yet.

[via Engadget]

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Philips has annouced a new and innovative 23cm (usually the photo frames are 18 cm only) PhotoFrame for digital photos. The new digital frame has a high performance LCD screen which allows to display photos with increased levels of sharpness, brightness and contrast courtesy of its high-density display.

The PhotoFrame is available in two design options - Modern or Classic. Both can be easily mounted on the walls. The PhotoFrame comes with the internal memory which is enough to store up to 150 photos. Additionally, it contains two memory card readers that support all major memory cards. It is possible to use two different memory cards at the same time.

The PhotoFrame includes a PhotoEffect Wizard which allows to make adjustments to images, such as rotation, cropping, zoom in and out as well as effects such as black and white or sepia colour changes, and the overlaying of fun frames.

[via Fareastgizmos]

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Dedicated Devices, Inc. puts together new DigitaLife Server 300 and DigitaLife Storage 300 products to produce DigitaLife System, the first digital home entertainment and network solution that is designed specifically to be built into new homes.

Key system features include:

• Centralized management, distribution and control of digital content, in all of the most popular formats, to anywhere in the house.

• Convenient private home network for sharing internet access, files, printers and other equipment throughout the home.

• Built-in residential gateway to the internet.

• Handles up to 8 streams of audio and photos, or 4 streams of video, independently and simultaneously.

• ActivLink software that automates the copying of digital media files to the DigitaLife Server.

• Gracenote Media Management software, which automatically names and categorizes a music collection by artist, album and genre.

• Network Manager, a browser-based control console for managing network and media settings.
• Support for IP/network cameras

The DigitaLife System looks cool but it covers only entertainment area of smart home and maybe security a bit (support of IP/network cameras). So, you have to integrate the DigitalLife into some home control system of enjoy just the entertainment automation. Also, The DigitaLife System supports only the Panasonic BB-HCM311A wired network camera and the Panasonic BL-C10A wired network camera. But they are not provide PoE (Power over Ethernet) which is very useful.

[via eHomeUpgrade]

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