Digital Home Theater - Digital Content Download

Chapter 8 Digital Content

Download, Sharing and Storage are the main advantage for digital home theater.  The analog home theater will be less convenient.  For the quality of the media file, digital file are much better and much more stable.  In this chapter, we will be focused on how to download the digital contents.

The so-called digital contents can be downloaded from the following channels:
(1) Digital TV system (ATSC, DVB-T, DVB-H)
(2) Digital Satellite
(3)  CD, VCD, DVD, FVD, ......
(4) Video Streaming on IP
(5) Flash memory and harddisk
(6) Music/Video Downloads

These various digital contents.  In application, there are quite many different.  For the future digital home entertainment center which is based on your personal computer.  All of these technology can be integrated together. The format can be interchangeable.  Thus, the technical background required for users will be much less.

Even though there are quite many manufacturer, most of them are based on their own business purpose. A lot of business are no longer eager to provide capital to do research.  Therefore, in order to integrate more technology together, it will need the end-user to purchase the new technology product many more time.  So that, the inventor can keep on inventing new technology.

For current personal computer, ATSC and DVB-T signal can be obtained by using Tuner with some add-on card to you PC or you may get the tuner with USB connector. After you connect it to you computer, video streaming can be brought in through internet to your personal computer PC.  Digital Satellite can be connected to you PC through some HDMI interface.

If you read in the signal through CD or Memory, it is even much more easier.

There are some issue for the quality of the hardware.  The Personal computer is not designed to provide high quality audio and video playback.  It is targeted at the low end market.  Besides, because Microsoft has the total control of the O.S.  There are not so many software developer than before. This has greatly limit the invention for the advances of these technology.

If you want to get the video streaming over internet, there are many web-site with many stations.  You may check the following links:
http://tv.charisma-usa.com

You may just click on the country you favor to get the free TV station from that country. (Some of the country does not support free TV at all).  If you have some good TV link, you may email us at sales@charisma-usa.com  We will add them unto our web-site as soon as possible.

In addition to that, there are also many hardware manufacturer.  They invented new video streaming hardware to convert the TV signal onto computer IP doamin. One of the famous examples is the Slingbox from Slingmedia:
http://www.slingmedia.com/indexa.php

Slingbox may allow you to watch TV of one nation from another country. For example, you may watch TV program in India from United State.  As long as you connected Slingbox at one TV at India and connect the slingbox on to internet, then you can start to use Sling Player to watch the Indian program at United State.  Similar method can be applied to all different countries.  As long as your upload speed at India is over 256Kb/s.  Typically speaking, 512kb/s will be btter for such application.

As a user of Slingbox for more than a year, its quality has been much better than other internet TV.  Slingbox can be fully controlled by Studio Commander.

Other than these standard TV station, there are Youtube, Google Video and many other new video streaming source.  You may download choose to watch those video clips from
http://video.google.com/
http://www.youtube.com/

After introduction to IP Video Streaming, I am now going to talk about the video and music download.  So far, the legal issues for video download is really a mess. Therefore, before you download the data, you have better check you legal rights and responsibility first.

For Video download, there are many softwares.  The most popular ones are Bit Torrent, emule, edonkey, DSL, It is hard to say which is more convenient and which is more stable. It is up to you for your own research.
http://video.charisma-usa.com

There is one major difference betewen Video download and Video Streaming.  Video download may allow you to share your digital contents with your friend. On the other hand, video streaming is hard to share with your friend. Normally, video download will give you a video signal of better quality as well.  However, it may take a longer time.

Before download, you may need to input the name of the video name onto a video search Engine. For example, at
bit@china

http://www.btchina.net/

website, you may download the video just like Google.  In order to facilitate such input, we invented the Studio Input software and the related input methods to help you to do that.

To input the text, first, you need to use the blue key to set your studio commander at PC mode. At this mode, you will see the following mode indicator:


The keyboard indicate PC mode, the 9 indicate the numerical input(or Bypass Mode).

After you press the blue key for the second time, you will be in the English input mode. Then, a mode indicator "en" will be shown.  This means lowercase input for English. If you press the star key, the system will rotate between en, En, EN for the lowercase, leading uppercase and uppercase of English text input.  For English input, you just need to remember that, there is only one key for each English letter.  a,b,c are all 2.   d,e,f are all 3, ..... They key location is the same as your phone.




For example, if you want to enter the phrase:computer

You may enter26678837

That means c=2, o=6, m=6, p=7,u=8, t=8, e=3, r=7. After entering these letters, you can use enter key to pick up the letter, or you may use mouse click to pick up the letter.If a word is more than 9 key such as the word "conversation", only the first 9 key will make sense in this input system.

After you finish the input function, just press the blue PC key until you reach the 9 mode. Or, you may use the ESC key to jump to the 9 mode directly.  In 9 mode, the Studio Input software has no function.  It is used as a standby mode
.