Arlington, Va. – The CEA’s Home Networking Committee (R7) said it has adopted a new standard for home networks — called CEA-2008 — The Digital Entertainment Network Initiative (DENi).
The group said the standard was devised to make it easier for consumers to share content over a home network and to establish consistent interoperability between consumer electronics devices.
The DENi collects existing standards and specifies how they work together, the committee said.
‘The DENi standard represents a generational leap forward for home audio and video products,’ said John Gildred, vice president of engineering for Pioneer Research Center USA Inc. and chairman of CEA’s R7.6 subcommittee that developed the standard. ‘With DENi, consumers will be able to choose compatible home networking products from different CE manufacturers and literally plug-and-play them together with no user setup required. Now that we have agreed on how to do audio/video networking, we can start building products which share content with other vendors’ products over the network.’
‘This is a precedent for CEA as it demonstrates the viability of a new standard development model,’ said Virginia Williams, CEA engineering director. ‘The broad support behind CEA-2008, and our collaboration with the DENi consortia, resulted in increased industry interest and rapid adoption of the standard. We’re pleased with the flexibility and ease-of-use that the DENi standard will help deliver to consumers and their home networks.’
The standard will enables interoperability between different manufacturers’ audio, video and imaging devices by clarifying how more than 60 different standards interrelate, the committee said. The standard calls for Internet Protocols (IP), with Ethernet as the common network platform, UPnP as the middleware, and a core set of supported audio and video formats.
In addition, DENi supports a quality of service scheme for Ethernet that was developed in CEA’s R7.5 A/V Networking subcommittee to allow for better interoperability between devices that support bandwidth reservation and those that only support prioritization.
Upcoming plans for the DENi standard include an interoperability ‘plugfest’ in August 2003, which allows manufacturers to evaluate their prototypes and product designs to ensure compatibility, and the rollout of an accompanying logo program for manufacturer self-certification, which will be handled by CEA’s Home Networks and IT (HNIT) division.
CEA-2008 is available from Global Engineering Documents at http://global.ihs.com.
