CEDIA 2014

Starting this November, the new Home Entertainment Motion Controller (HEMC) from D-BOX will bring the company’s advanced motion coding experience to far more than just movies on Blu-ray and DVD disc. D-BOX will now be delivering its proprietary excitement of the fourth dimension of motion from any source, including movies streamed from services like Netflix, Vudu, and Apple TV and even from movies viewed on cable and satellite.

In the past, the D-BOX controller was reliant on reading the multi-channel digital bitstream from the optical output of a DVD or Blu-ray player and any variation in the specific bitstream – including any changes or edits to the film - would keep the D-BOX controller from being able to lock-in and identify the film against its built-in library. With the new HEMC, the company will be able to accept either an HDMI or analog audio input and use a Shazam-like feature to identify movies that have been encoded by the company by looking at the 2-channel downmix of the signal.

While the identification process took a bit longer for the HEMC controller to sync on the movie than I remembered from the previous model, taking about 4-5 seconds, once it locked onto the demo material, it immediately synced up and delivered the exciting D-BOX experience.

The HEMC ditches the previous controller’s LED display and rack-mount, component-styled form factor and will be an out-of-site box controlled via a new MyDBox iPad app, which will allow for adjusting the intensity of the motion and for displaying the current title being processes as well as listing all the movies in the D-BOX motion library (currently 1,300).

For more on the D-BOX experience, read my review here. The HEMC will sell for $3500.