Back to the cat 5 being run in a house. They no longer manufacture cat 3 phone cable, so it's all cat 5 now. Being a Master electrician with 17 years experience and seeing the prices quoted for the wireless network it would still be cheaper to run a single phone cable from your network and install a jack for the radio. It's also standard practice to in stall a phone jack next to every coax jack.

I also know a guy whose company is working on the design and manufacture of a chip that decodes 802.11b and Bluetooth.

Yes, yours is an excellent idea and definitely the route I would take if I was not renting, and therefore unallowed to open the walls.

I know this is a little off of the Outlaw topic, but does anyone know what network file system protocalls the Audiotron speaks. ie. do I have to add SAMBA to my system or does it know appletalk or nfs?
Aaron

The Audiotron uses standard Windows file sharing (SMB) for its LAN playback capability. It can also play net radio streams using Shoutcast or Icecast protocol.

Hmm. My network also uses Appletalk and NFS (Linux PCs & Macs) and I'd really rather not add Samba to the mix just for a tuner. Anybody know if competing products will run over Appletalk or NFS? Audiotron, maybe?

The IR1000 seems to be just a bit too Windows-centric (Runs on WinCE, understands WMA but not MP3) for my tastes.

Unless they plan on upgrading it to add these features.

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Matthew J. Hill
matt@idsi.net

From the Outlaw IR-1000 "Press Release" page of the Outlaw site:



Looks like MP3 is definitely planned. How and in what manner remains to be seen.

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pat----

email: pat@sklenar.info ---===--- home page: Grumpy's Lair

As for the Audiotron's network support, I got this from the Audiotron site:



Based on that, I'd say that you're looking at needing either a Windows-centric network or a network that at least allows for Samba to get the Audiotron going. (Samba's not too hard to get up and running, but I can see where it would be irritating to have to add another protocol for a single device. I think the included software is Windows only, too, but I'm not certain.

As for the Windows-centric nature of the IR1000, it's sort of hard to say still -- there's not enough info about it. WindowsCE is one of the few OS's around for a device like this. Linux would also have been an alternative (one of the few, possibly the only other), but I got the impression that part of the reason the IR1000 exists is that one of Outlaw's partners came up with something (probably software) that triggered the whole thing, and that original tech may have limited their options. It's also possible that going with WinCE gave them WMA support "out of the box." (Edit: Follow-up thought -- there's no way I know of to play back WMA under Linux, which may have helped push them to WinCE.) Either way, it's all speculation still. I've asked them about the IR1000 a couple times, and one time I did get pretty clear confirmation that MP3 is in its future. Time will tell...

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gonk -- Saloon Links | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | 950 Review

[This message has been edited by gonk (edited April 30, 2002).]

Peter called last night on an unrelated subject, but before we got off the phone, I asked about the IR1000 and MP3. He said that it will play MP3s. He's not in charge of this project (the 950 has kept him quite busy, thank you ), so he doesn't know the detailed plans, nor if that support will be there when the first units ship. However, since this will be an internet appliance, updating it's capabilities online are a given.

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pat----

email: pat@sklenar.info ---===--- home page: Grumpy's Lair

Gonk: I wouldn't be surprised if WMA pushed them to CE, it's one of M$'s classic marketing tactics. Of course, it begs the question: why WMA at all? There are quite a few perfectly good compression protocols already out there.

WMA makes me nervous, not just because of its connection to Microsoft, but also because of some rather suspect copy protection features built into it.

I'm going to stop now, lest this become a discussion on the comparative economics of the PC world, rather than a discussion of the IR1000's capabilities.

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Matthew J. Hill
matt@idsi.net

We need to keep one thing in mind -- the IR1000 is focused on being a tuner only, not a front-end for a computer audio library (which makes it a good bit different from the Audiotron, which was designed to be a front-end and had the Internet tuner software added later). As such, there are only a few choices of formats for the IR1000: WMA (due to Microsoft's "take over the market by giving away the product" scheme that worked so well with IE), MP3, RealAudio (gag -- can we say "messy"?), Quicktime, and maybe Ogg Vorbis. At the moment, the IR1000 will support WMA at launch and MP3 shortly afterward.

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gonk -- Saloon Links | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | 950 Review