Home Theater PC or Mac Mini Is the Heart of Your Digital Living Room
Polls
Loading ...
With so many options available in the market, it is easy to get lost in choosing a media player. A media player can be a Home Theater PC (HTPC), a game console or other type of device which is designed to play different kinds of media. While game consoles like Xbox and PS3 have entered to many living room, you still might feel that you are missing something. While you are able to watch your movies with ease, it might be cumbersome to load your images from the camera to the console or it feels awkward trying to browse with the primitive built-in internet browser. It soon starts to feel that why not to put the computer to the living room.
Selecting the media player has big influence on other media experience dimensions, so the decision should be made based on the play, entertain, control and share dimensions. To my experience so far only computers can really qualify as a media player when it comes balancing all 5 dimensions. The key question, which one fits to your living room design, is powerful and silent enough and does not destroy your budget.
The challenge is then how to find a computer which is powerful, pretty and small enough to fit into your living room design. Furthermore it needs to be compatible with your high definition TV, so again you notice that e.g. the vga-output in your laptop is not enough to watch high definition videos. Or you might notice that while your PS3 was able to play your HD-videos with ease, the laptop or desktop computer is missing the performance or codecs (what is codec anyways you might ask) to play your videos.
In my case, the performance become a real issue after purchasing a HD-video camera for my home videos. My laptop was not simply powerful enough to play or edit the videos smoothly. For this reason I changed to Mac Mini HTPC as it was compatible with my existing connect, entertain, control and share dimensions. At the end of the day, Mac Mini brought better design, more performance and usability, but it is still only one of the key dimensions of my digital living room. This means, I still need the software, a comfortable way of controlling it and a place to store and share my media files.
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2010 My Media Experience