How long till Sirius/XM is added?

You should make it more clear between the serial cable used for adoption and the IR cable. I had a few beers in me during setup and tried to adopt using the IR cable.

It would also be nice to just point to a share on the network and not have to use DLNA.

Other then that it looks like a good start.

It absolutely should support playing from a network share. Requiring DLNA will mean a lot of people will not select it relative to something like Sonos that can play from a network share.

I don't get why so many companies support UPnP, and the media renderer related services, and don't support the AV Transport service's capability to just point the player at a network based file. Without that, a lot of systems will have limited ability to integrate it, because they can only serve up files via a network share.

* Of course this assumes that Heos doesn't support the direct setting of the AV transport URI, maybe it does in addition to DLNA support, but so far all the devices I've seen that implement DLNA don't support the simpler (and far more widely supportable) scheme.

Any word on the Crestron integration?

FASTLS

Have played around a bit more with my HEOS Link.

I will not sell these until they add the option to point at a shared folder. I have never bothered with DLNA before, and have no desire to start now.

All of my 60gigs of music are tagged perfectly with MP3tag. Most of it did not import correctly, and spending time with WMP to find out why is so far down my to do list that I cant even see it.

Denon has a huge opportunity, in the CI channel for this product. We are begging for something like HEOS that we can integrate. But if I cant even use it in my own home to replace my Squeezebox, I sure as hell cant sell it!

+1

Put your media on a Network Attached Storage device (NAS) and be done with it. It's not that hard guys and gals.

By the way, killer promotion going on now. Buy a HEOS Amp, get a free pair of Boston Acoustics Voyager 50's in white. Additional promotion on the HEOS 3, 5 and 7 wireless speakers. Stock up now, offer ends March 21st

But the issue is, if the player cannot play from a network share, that won't help any. If it can only play DLNA served media, then you have to use a DLNA enabled server for the media, you can't just play the files off of the hard drive through such a device.

True enough but in my admittedly limited experience all of the NAS units I have ever purchased (4 NETGEAR and 3 Synology) can act as DLNA servers.

Now being able to function as a DLNA server may or may not be considered a good thing.

It's kind of a both sides of the coin issue I guess. You might have a non-DLNA server, or you might have non-DLNA clients (there are lots of them.) Pulling the data as files via the network is sort of the simplest, most ubiquitous scheme, so any player should probably support it. Nothing wrong with supporting other options, but don't skip the one that basically anyone ripping media to a server can support out of the box basically, however they are doing it.

And of course there's the issue of the automation system. In order to integrate media into an automation system, the AS has to understand how to read in the data about the media available, present it to the user, and then has to know how to send a command to the player to play it.

If the player/server only supports DLNA, then the AS system also has to support DLNA, which probably not a lot do. Whereas lots of systems can pull in the info from iTunes, DVD Profiler, My Movies, J.River, etc... and or their own media manager, all of which generally just provide the shared path to the media files. So that path is all that the automation system has available to send to the media player to get the media player to play it. In that case you need a player that can be pointed at a shared file or directory.

One nice feature with HEOS is that all products have a USB input. Take an external USB HDD, connect it the USB input on any HEOS device; that USB HDD is now a DLNA compliant NAS available to any other device/speaker on the network.

Thanks,

Paul
D+M Group

About that Crestron thingamajig?

Crestron is still working through it. Hope to have an update in the next week.

Thanks,

Paul

Are we close?

FASTLS

Thats great. But is there a reason for not also adding the ability to point to a shared folder?

We are looking at it. There is extra work for SMB and CIF network shares with the need for the speaker to initially and then continually(when new content is added) index and store the track list. DLNA doesn't have this issue.

Thanks,
Paul