Ziova, is yet another in a long stream of electronics companies springing up to offer HD video streaming set-top boxes. Never heard of Ziova? You’re not alone, but thanks to the huge wave of people switching to video streaming as their predominant method of video watching, instead of DVDs, the number of new electronics companies popping up to produce devices like Ziova’s CS505 High Definition Network Media Player is growing.

The CS505 sports all of the bells and whistles. However, it’s core function is to connect to your LAN to stream video from any hard drives you have connected. The bells and whistles are impressive, too–it can wirelessly connect to your network as well as use wires. It also comes with an optical drive that (strangely) will only play DVDs, not record them.

If you’re not about the bells and whistles, that’s totally understandable. Sometimes bells and whistles over-complicate things and sometimes you want to just watch your media. So, if this is you,Ziova has just announced their CS615 HD Media Streamer. It supports a stack of formats, including the obvious WMV9, QuickTime, MP4, H.264, MPEG-1/2, and the less obvious FLAC, OGG, LPCM, WMA, AAC, WAV, AC3, DTS, JPG, BMP, GIF and PNG, according to a recent Engadget post. Of course, it can also do High-Def (back to the obvious). However, it doesn’t have an optical drive and doesn’t do wifi–keeping it simple, it still connects to your LAN to stream video via Ethernet cables. The advantage is that you don’t have to have thatwifi going if you don’t want to.

D-Link, the folks that brought us a stack of great low-end, but generally reliable, multimedia and wireless products now brings us theDSM-330. A not-yet-available-in-the-US media streamer/extender-thing, that is an officially sanctioned DivX.com product. In fact, DivX.com features the DSM-330 as a “DivX Connected” device on their “DivX Connected” product page (http://www.divx.com/connected/product.php ). This is all fine and dandy, but what, you’re probably wondering, can the D-Link DSM-330 DivX Connected HD Media Player really do?

For starters, it can stream HD DivX. Which is, you’ll admit, pretty handy (as it is obvious). After all, DVDs take up a lot of space. Ripping them and storing them on a giant hard drive is a great way to save on storage and free up shelving for all those books you’ve been meaning to read. Connect your PC to aWiFi LAN and the DSM-330 can connect to your PC and stream DivX , etc, etc… by now if you don’t know this drill, you might want to take a class to catch up since media streamers sure seem to be the future.

The DSM-330 comes with a handy remote and on-screen controls to “manage your PC media.” It also comes with conveniently located front-embeddedUSB port. This way you can plug an external hard drive or ultra-portable flash-based thumb drive to it and play DivX files from there. The sad news is that it’s not available in the US, as of yet, but you can order the D-Link DSM-330 from Amazon.co.uk for £149.99. Whether they’ll deliver it to you outside the UK, well, you’ll have to bring that up with them.

British company Passive Technologies has a new kind of media center–it’s called the LifeStation HD and it can deliver HD DVD and Blu-Ray DVD support, on top of a hard drive, all manner of video format-playing and a stack of other features. Sadly, the LifeStation HD’s webpage is not terribly specific about it’s features. Sure, they go on and on about what the LifeStation HD can do, but not how or how well it does it. As in, we know it’s got a hard drive that can be as big as 9 terabytes, but there is nothing mentioned on there about standard available sizes or whether you can stream video from other sources on your LAN. It does mention you can surf the Internet, but again, it doesn’t mention how. It seems like you may need to order it based on your own custom specs. Passive Technologies is a UK-based company, so if you happen to be in the UK you can stop in at one of their “authorised lifePartner Premium dealers” to find out exactly how to go about ordering one of these guys.

In the meantime, we can tell you that the LifeStream HD supports HD and can output in 1080p (nice but hardly special these days), it can play iPod formatted files and, since it comes with an AMD processor and sports a tweaked Windows Vista UI, you can probably play other file formats after installing the right codecs. It also comes with something called “Silent Passive Cooling” but the LSHD’s page doesn’t explain what that is. It does explain that Dynachill 3, which also comes with the LSHD, allows the box to function without any loud fans. In fact, a quick jaunt about their website results in no easily-found information about either Silent Passive Cooling orDynachill 3.

All in all, this sounds like a great device. However, since deets are sparse on their site and the company only sells in the UK (though it’s reasonable to assume you could order from elsewhere on a dealer’s website) it seems like theLifeStream HD is probably something best left to British gadget freaks since they can more easily return the thing if it doesn’t work as advertised. Generally speaking, it’s probably more effective for Passive Technologies (or any electronics company) to be up front with specs, prices and general details as opposed to relying solely on advertising copy. Sadly, this is exactly what the Passive Technologies website does. Perhaps Passive Aggressive Technologies would be a better company name?

The iViewer, according to its web page, takes any video input and sends it, wirelessly, to your TV.  If the concept of wireless video transmission rings any bells for you, you might recall that old-fashioned technology grampa used to use–it was called “Broadcast Television.”  The theory was this: using radio waves, one could transmit the video signal through the air to your TV set.  It’s basically how TV has run for over half-a-century, and in a pinch, you can still catch the odd TV signal using nothing but an antenna and your Television.  Of course, these days the idea of getting your media to your TV without wires seemsunnecessary what with long cables and wifi media extenders being all the rage.  However, that hasn’t stopped Homer (D’OH!) Technology from duplicating that age-old technology on a very small scale for your home.

Quite literally, according to the iViewer’s web page, this little guy is a miniature TV station.  It takes a composite input from anything, though its page seems to think an iPod or PSP would be the target gadgets, and then broadcast it on one of four channels you can then tune your TV to.  Since this thing is a fairly diminutive 5 inches by 3 inches, it’s probably pretty portable.  Think: the FM transmitter you use to listen to youriPod on your car stereo with only with a TV.  Now you can begin to see how something like this could come in handy.  No need to carry extra cables around, just this little device.  Just plug youriPod into and broadcast to your TV.

Of course, that’s the rub–if you need to plug the iPod into the iViewer, why not just plug your iPod into the TV in the first place?  All this device does is give you something else to carry around and allows you a bit more freedom when you watch something from your iPod or PSP on a TV.  This one can probably stay off your “must get” list.  Unless you have $26.99 (at eCost) burning a hole in your pocket and you don’t want to spend it on something useful.

Convergence continues to blur the line between devices with Toshiba’s Qosmio G40 multimedia laptop. Already, Toshiba has the Qosmio G45-AV680 which is almost as good. Both laptops come stacked with some amazing multimedia bells and whistles on top of a pretty impressive set of specs for a laptop. For starters, the G45 comes with a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 2 gigs of memory, 320 gigs of hard drive space and a recordable optical drive. All, perfectly reasonabledeets by today’s standards. But the features that make the G45 worth the $3000 price tag just might blow your mind.

To begin, the laptop features a somewhat predictable 17 inch display featuring “WUXGA with Ultimate TruBrite® Technology”. That’s definitely cool for a multimedia laptop. However, what does adding HD DVD recordability to that optical drive do for you? How about throwing in an HD TV Tuner? How about Bluetooth, 5 USB ports, webcam, remote, fingerprint reader, iLink, an S-Video output and an HDMI output? Yeah, pretty impressive huh? That’s all on the G45–the newer, better G40 has two TV tuners, a 2.2Ghz processor and a 400 gig hard drive.

While Toshiba has the G45 available right now on their website for $3000, currently, and sadly, the G40 looks to be only available in Japan and will run you around $3500 if you were to buy it there. Hopefully, the price will drop at least a little when it reaches Western shores. The thing to note with theQosmio line of Toshiba laptops is that the TV and the computer have merged to create a whole new type of multimedia device. That’s the very concept of “convergence,” where, slowly but surely, devices are merging into one.

Source: AkihabaraNews