The Home Theater PC
The star of the show: PCs intended for your living room.
What do all of these PCs have in common?:
They have a built-in TV tuner for receiving and recording TV programs. They serve as a stereo and as a slide projector. They're often HD ready. And for use as a computer, the solution is a small wireless keyboard with built-in trackball.Tatung
Tatung is the only maker at the CeBIT that is showing a complete line of home theater PCs. There are five models. At the top of the line is a Microsoft Media Center PC, whose only particularity is its case, that looks like a digital video recorder. It has a 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 and all the trimmings. But the PVR-2000 and PVR-1000 models are more interesting. Their design is intriguing. But above all, Tatung has understood the fact that a PC dedicated to living-room use doesn't require the kind of performance that pushes the price into the stratosphere, where you and I can't hope to follow. The processor is a simple Celeron M at 600 MHz or 1 GHz - plenty enough for the tasks it'll be required to perform. This line operates under Windows XP. The STB-3000 and 4000 are based on Windows CE and Celeron M. They're also intended only for home theater tasks.
Medion
Medion had already taken a stab at home theater PCs with its first Digitainer, which was sold in Germany for a few months. The shape resembled a piece of stereo equipment, but it still had a rather large footprint. An interesting point is that the play functions could be accessed without a complete boot of the system.
Medion will repeat the experiment with the Digitainer 2. It will be redesigned, in particular with more suitable connectivity and will be HD Ready with a YUV output.
Medion also showed another prototype equipped with Media Center Edition 2005. The case has the slim design of an ultra-flat DVD player and you really have to wonder how they manage to fit a PC in there. In fact, they do it by using notebook components - the processor is a Pentium M, the hard disk is in 2.5" (6.35 cm) format and the DVD drive is a slim model.
