Half-Solutions

Microsoft tried an initial solution in the form of the Media Center. But what do you do with it? You're not going to watch TV and listen to music in the same room with your computer and you're not going to work and surf the Web in your living room (It may be the perfect all-in-one solution for a student's room, though). And then there have been proprietary attempts with servers built into consumer-electronics equipment. That's just as poor a solution, since it means you no longer have a computer and computers are the most practical solution for finding digital content.

Real Solutions

In fact, there are three solutions that would meet our needs and we tried to track them down in the aisles of the CeBIT show.

Multimedia Receivers

The first consists in using a multimedia receiver. This is a unit that is connected via Wi-Fi to a server PC and to the TV and stereo to display content from the PC using a remote control. That's the principle of the ShowCenter from Pinnacle. The problem is that for now, the implementation leaves something to be desired and it forgets one essential aspect: TV. It remains in the living room and programs are recorded by a digital recorder that's separate from the system. One solution is for the TV tuner to be in the PC and for content to be viewed via the multimedia receiver, which would also serve to program and manage recordings. Pinnacle has moved in this direction by associating its PC TV Media Center with a ShowCenter. You can take a look at our article on the PCTV Media Center . The other solution is to equip the multimedia receiver with a hard disk and/or a TV tuner.

Home Theater PC

The second possibility is to put a PC in your living room, one that's dedicated to home theater use and communicates with the server PC via Wi-Fi. This is an excellent solution for anybody who wants a high definition home theater setup and doesn't want to wait.

The PC connects to a video projector, an LCD TV or a plasma TV via DVI. This requires a PC that fits into the living-room environment and is perfectly silent. We recently published an article on this subject, using a SSF PC .

The home theater PC solution was the hit of CeBIT 2005. They were in evidence at many exhibits, each one quieter and more handsome than the one before. We'll give you a look at some of them.