Hi all,

I just read news I think some of you will enjoy, I certainly did . Recently Kenwood announced two new products, an AV-receiver and a DVD-player, which set themselves apart from the masses through the addition of an ethernet port and Ogg Vorbis decoding!

The DVD-player DVF-N7080, highlights:

• network: supports MPEG1, MPEG2, Xvid, MP3, WMA ver. 8 and 9, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG
• PCMCIA-slot: supports JPEG
• DVD-drive video formats: supports DVD-Video, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, JPEG (Foto-CD), S-VCD, VCD 2,0, DivX and MPEG4,
• DVD-drive audio formats: supports Audio-CD, CD-R, CD-RW, MP-3 and WMA

The AV-receiver VRS-N8100, highlights:

• network: supports MPEG1, MPEG2, DivX ver. 4 and 5, Xvid, MP3, WMA ver. 8 and 9, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG
• PCMCIA slot: supports JPEG

The DVF-N7080 officially retails for about 350 EUR in Germany, the VRS-N8100 for about 800 EUR. Both components are supposed to become available in september/october. There is a more detailed article on the german Kennwood site here (yes, it is in german).

Nice, nice, nice! With those products the home entertainment network is now finally coming closer to reality! My whole collection is MP3 / Ogg Vorbis, if I had the money I'd buy them immediately. Just imagine how cool it must be to access gigabytes of music from the living room and listen to high-end equipment! No more computer noise, no fiddling with the keyboard and even the girlfriend gets to appreciate your affection for Ogg Vorbis

I'm curious though to see how they implemented the user interface for navigation through the data, it's pretty easy to mess up things there...


/ingmar

Personally, I'm curious to see if all 44.1 kHz files are resampled to 48 kHz, and if other sample rates are supported (22.05 and 32 kHz).