Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ Activy Media Center combines a variety of devices in one unit. It is a DVD-recorder, a media server and an internet set-top box with TV reception, all in one. Thanks to the two TV tuner cards, you can record up to two TV programmes to the internal drive in parallel. Buyers can choose between versions for DVB-S, DVB-T or conventional analogue TV.

The spartan user interface even lets you clip unwanted advertisements from recorded shows. Movies are played back directly from the internal hard drive. If you want to perform any further editing on your recordings on another PC, you have to go the roundabout way of burning them to a DVD and copying them over from there. Direct copying over the network is not an option. The same goes for copying content to USB devices such as thumb drives or external hard drives.

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The Activy Media Center can also be used as an audio and video server, streaming its recordings to uPNP video clients on your local network.

Its price tag of €800 does not make the Activy Media Center one of the cheaper models on the market. However, adding up the functionality you’re getting in one device, we feel the price is justified. Sadly, we were unable to convince the AMC 570 to run any games.

While the device’s overall concept is well implemented, Fujitsu Siemens needs to put in some more work where the technical aspects are concerned. For example, the Activy lacks an HDMI connector for use with flat-panel TVs, forcing you to use a DVI-HDMI adapter – with separate audio cables, of course. In general, the AMC 570 offers only very limited support for high definition video content. Therefore, we don’t really approve of the “HDTV” logo on its front. Nowadays, many users have support for Blu-ray, HD-DVD and HDTV using DVB-S2 on their wish list – functionality we hope to see in a future member of the Activy family.