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Netgear announces NeoTV 550 & 350 HD Media Players plus other networking goodies
This week Netgear made a battery of new product announcements related to home entertainment and Powerline networking. On the media side, the NeoTV 550 & 350 HD players look a lot like last year's Digital Entertainer Elite, minus the 500GB of internal storage and access to VOD services like CinemaNow. Both are however capable of playing a robust list of codecs in full HD from a variety of attached sources like USB, eSATA (in the case of the 550) or SD storage, as well as streaming content from UPnP, DLNA or WMP11 networks. The 550 adds in support for external Blu-ray drives and BD-Live too, all for $219, which should appeal any of the poor souls with an unused standalone drive. Three new Powerline kits -- AV 200, AV 500, and AV+ 500 -- were also announced to help consumers avoid the pain of stringing Ethernet in every direction. The entry level AV 200 appears to improve on the previous HDXB101 kit by offering the same theoretical 200mbps in addition to push button security enhancements and greener power consumption. The AV 500 kit provides the same and ramps the networking speeds to up to -- you guessed it -- 500mbps, while the "+" version throws in a pass-through filtered AC socket to avoid sacrificing precious outlets. Priced all below $200, every kit will available be by mid November for all the fall home networking your heart could desire. Peep the galleries and PR below for further details. %Gallery-100540% %Gallery-100541%
UPnP Forum releases v2 specs
The UPnP Forum has rolled out version two of its UPnP specifications, which promises to make it easier for users to network various devices together, while at the same time keeping companies happy by ensuring that all the content flying around remains protected by DRM. Some of the biggest additions to the v2 specs come in the UPnP AV MediaServer and MediaRenderer device classes, which encompass everything from PCs, DVD players, and PVRs to televisions, stereo systems, and portable media players. The Forum's mostly talking in generalities in their announcement, but it looks like among other things, the new specs define how programs and other digital content is recorded and stored for later viewing. You'll also be pleased to know that the new specs are also fully backwards compatible with the v1 specifications, so your gear's not obsolete just yet -- well it is, but not because of this upgrade.[Via eHomeUpgrade]
