Home Theatre PC minus PC

EurekaThe whole time I was waiting for the release of Apple TV, the devices I should have been lusting after were silently released by some Korean hardware manufacturers. Perhaps I had missed their release because their web pages are Search Engine Retardant containing no text, but images of text? When will companies realize that Google does not have a GIF braille reader?

The trend in Home Theatre PCs is to drop the PC and soup up a hard drive enclosure with multimedia features. Drop in a hard drive sized to your liking and start dumping your media onto it. A remote control will help you navigate your vast collection of JPEGs, audio files, video files, even HD! Some of these enclosures can output DVI for video, and digital out for surround sound processing in your home theatre receiver. And often sport Wi-Fi so you needn’t even connect them physically to your computer.

Here are all the ones I’ve come across. Please let me know if I’m missing any of them.

The best single online Canadian source I have come across to date is Ontario based onlybestrated.com



Published:
8.23.07 / 10pm
Category:
Hi-fi

2 Comments

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  1. Michael Bodalski 9.18.07 / 3pm

    Thanks a lot Ryan! After the post DemoCamp bar talk I decided to see what the hell you were rambling on about and why I shouldn’t just go buy a MacMini as a HTPC. Wowzers!

    There are some great devices in that last at really great prices. No I’ve got to do some digging and see which is the best for my needs. I do like the looks of the TVIX Box M-5100SH.

  2. Michael Bodalski 10.19.07 / 5pm

    Hey Ryan, just wanted to let you know that a few weeks ago I picked up a TViX M-4100SH, and it’s awesome.

    I’ve only used it for SD video, so I can’t say how well it’s HD playback is, but I have no reason to think it wouldn’t be great. With a little work you can manage to get it on a WiFi network, and it has a built in FTP server that you can use to load files onto it from.

    One problem with the FTP server, it’s not really very stable – and I was pulling my hair out trying to find an FTP client that will connect to it. Filezilla will not at all, and several other are quite flaky. Smart FTP did a nice job, but it seems to cause the FTP server to “hang” when it disconnects, requiring a restart of the server.

    What actually ended up being the best was just using the FTP client built into IE6, which I had not used in years but tried after I saw someone at the office use it a week ago.

    I didn’t try any Mac clients cause my media server is a Windows box, and I’ve heard command line clients work really well.

    You can also have it stream across the network, but my WiFi wasn’t fast enough to keep up with it and the video was unmatchable. I’m sure a wired network would be fine but I would rather store my media on the 500GB drive I have in the player anyhow.

    The interface is nice enough, not “Apple nice”, but I have no complaints. The remote is well designed, easy to work in the dark, and has a high quality feel to to. The whole package easily passed the wife test.

    If you are still in the market for a video jukebox type device, I recommend it but make a note that setting up the network side might take a little time. You can always plug it into a USB jack and copy files over – which was pain free, but not ideal for me going forward.

    If you have any questions – fire them my way.

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