You may recall my review of the brite-View BV-2322 Air SyncHD Wireless HDMI Bridge from last year’s Network World Cool Yule Tools review – I absolutely loved it. But, being as I had a ton of products to test at the time, I couldn’t really put this one into a production environment for long-term practical evaluation. Well, I finally got around to that, and the results have been excellent – the setup not so much, but, wow, very-high-quality HD on the really big screen is a joy to behold.
The motivation for this test was my increasing dissatisfaction with my SlingBox Pro, which I’ve used for a couple of years to get TV from a cable box into our Wireless Media Facility, which is a home-theater-style testbed for, well, wireless media. There is a Blu-Ray player present in this room for use as a reference, but all other media comes off wireless, normally through a Mac Mini. It’s also a great wireless office.
My long-standing (and still in place) Slingbox-centric wireless TV setup has the SlingBox connected to a “game adapter” type of WLAN client and the content, and, after relaying through an AP two floors away, the result showing up on the big screen today via the Web-based SlingPlayer on the Mac Mini. My irritation with Sling is that they’ve yet to produce an HDMI-based product (their latest Pro-HD model not only has no HDMI, but is also limited to 1080i), and video quality, while OK, looks less than optimal on a 100+-inch projection screen. I just upgraded the projector to 1080p (an Acer H7531D, an astonishing value if there ever was one – check this one out if you’re in the market for a 1080p projector), and the image is a little better (in a reasonably-sized window, but certainly not full-screen), but I’m still not giving Sling any more money, at least not now. BTW, since their acquisition by EchoStar, the emphasis there has clearly shifted to OEM products, and end-user support today is decidedly poor, so I’m not hopeful that they’ll ever build what I need.
So, why not, I thought, connect the brite-View transmitter to the HDMI-out of one of my cable boxes and connect the brite-View receiver to an HDMI-in on my Onkyo A/V receiver? The HDMI pass-though on the transmitter routes to the TV, BTW, so nothing is lost here.
The result? Wow, again! The brite-View, based on Amimon/WHDI technology, is just great – and this product is now a year old; I’m hoping to test newer products for this year’s Network World Holiday Gift Guide. The only real issue is in the placement of the brite-View boxes – there appears to be some sensitivity here in being located near other electronics. With a little distance (half a meter seems to do it) and a little tweaking of orientation, though, the link is now rock-solid. The only other problem is in the brite-View’s built-in IR mouse. The cable isn’t long enough (nor is the IR repeater cable on the receiver) to make this useful, so I’m using a separate Terk IR repeater for IR remote control. No big deal.
I continue to recommend Amimon’s technology for applications like this. This setup saves the need to rent yet another cable box and run cable into yet another room, which wouldn’t be allowed in my case regardless. And the image quality really must be seen to be believed. I’m looking forward to trying more products in this class – I know the prime application here is linking a receiver to a display, but, as this test shows, there are other possibilities as well.
