Connect the living room wirelessly

On cable at home everyone would like to do without. They not only disturb the eye, but can also develop into tripping. In a living room, equipped with home cinema equipment, Blu-ray players, satellite receivers and record players are connected by cable to the AV receiver. In turn, the picture is sent via HDMI to the TV hanging on the wall, or across the room to the projector, which radiates from the ceiling to the screen.


Picture gallery


In addition, loudspeaker cables run not only to the comparatively close-up front speakers, but also to the rear speakers, which often provide surround sound at the other end of the living room. Finally there is the LAN cable for the connection to the home network, which leads along the wall to the router, which is in the study.


Faster and farther


But all these strippers are not mandatory. Apart from the cables for the current, for which no real alternative has yet been found.


Network cables can be most easily discarded. Because hardly a router builds today only a cable-bound home network. Nearly every device is also wireless. And if the TV, player or AV receiver is not equipped with a WLAN module, the deficiency can be easily remedied.


Many manufacturers offer as an optional accessory USB dongles for the price of 70 euros and more, which upgrade the wireless access to the home network. If these dongles are too expensive or do not exist for your product: There are LAN-to-WLAN adapters, which can be used universally. These small boxes connect via LAN cable to the networkable device and wireless to the router.


In order to stream high resolution films from the Internet or from the computer to the home network, sufficient bandwidth must be available for transport. Therefore, it is important that the router and the network-capable device support the WLAN-n standard. This means that today you can achieve a high data rate of up to 300 Mbit / s with TV, Player & Co. If the router is too far away or if there are massive walls in between, the reception may suffer significantly.


In this case, for example, WLAN range extenders such as the AVM FRITZ! WLAN Repeater 300E help. This helper transmits itself to the networkable device and relays the signals by LAN or WLAN to the router. However, optimal transmission rates can only be achieved with WLAN extenders.


An alternative is Powerline: This technique sends network data via the power line. Although there are still cables from the Powerline adapter in the socket to the device necessary. For this reason, with adapters with a transmission rate of 200 Mbit / s, sufficient reserves are available to stream HD video to remote rooms.


But in some cases you do not only want to access the videos, photos and music that are on the computer in your home network. Perhaps the TV should be used as a screen of the computer


Various solutions exist for this. Philips, for example, is adding a PC software to its current TVs to beam the TV screen to the TV over the network.


With the HDMI WLAN adapter Auvisio PC2TV 720p, any TV with HDMI input receives this function. The small black box receives not only the picture and sound information from the computer. It also has a USB interface that allows you to connect a mouse or keyboard to work on the computer.


To view Internet content because the TV does not have its own web portal, to track live streams in the web browser that the TV can not display through its built-in web browser because it does not support Flash videos, or because You'd better answer e-mails from the couch in the living room than from the desktop PC.