Place Shifting Video Juneau AK

The personal video recorder is one of the most successful and frequently used components of audio/video gear that we install in our clients homes. In fact, most of our clients have several recordersone in the main family room and one in a home theater area and/or master bedroom. These personal video recorders allow our busy clients to watch their favorite shows when they want to watch them and anywhere in the home where we have installed these recorders. But what if they want to watch these home-recorded shows away from their home, lets say from their laptop in the comfort of a hotel room with a high-speed Internet connection?

Such a solution is now possible thanks to a series of technical innovations in the streaming of MPEG4 compressed video. Sony, with its product called LocationFree ( www.sony.com/locationfree ) and SlingMedia (www.slingmedia.com) ( www.slingmedia.com have introduced products this year that are capable of encoding and compressing the audio/video signals coming from the back of a standard-definition personal video recorder and stream them to the homes router. From there they can be received by a Windows PC client attached anywhere in the world on an Internet broadband connection.

The products work like this: Your client has just checked into her hotel room with high-speed Internet access. She connects her laptop computer to the Internet, checks e-mail, and then decides to watch the 60 Minutes episode recorded at home. With the Sony product (for example) she launches a software application called LocationFree. The LocationFree software asks her if she is home or away (the laptop could also be used to capture the streaming 60 Minutes video stream at home). Clicking on the away mode starts the process of connecting the laptop to the clients home router via a DDNS service that Sony provides. This DDNS service ensures that the client can always find and connect to her home router even if her home Internet service provider dynamically changes the IP address of the home router.

Once the router connection is established, the video stream from the homes personal recorder starts to play in a window that opens on the laptop. Your client can even control the video recorder because the client software has IR codes built into the software that emulate the IR codes of the personal video recorder remote. Clicking on the guide button on the laptop screen issues an IR command sent from the hotel room laptop to their home router and then from the router to the Sony LocationFree BaseStation where the IR code is blasted to the personal video recorder to show the guide. Very cool!

Now for a real-life example: I was at my sons soccer tournament last month and between games I drove my car with my wireless laptop around the local neighborhood looking for someones unprotected wireless access point (this took about a minute!) Once connected to the Internet I launched my Sony LocationFree software and I was able to watch a Davis Cup tennis match o...

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