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12.04.07
The Evolution Of Home Entertainment
 By Thomas Hawk
Fred Wilson is out with a post describing the evolution of his home entertainment set up.
After putting together what sounds like an expensive "over the top" Creston System, he now has a set up with three separate entertainment systems with lots of goodies with Mac Minis as the centerpiece to the strategy.
From Fred: "The thing I didn't realize when I set up this system is how much a difference the mac minis would make. We use them to play DVDs, we use them to play video we buy or download from the web, we use them to power screen savers on the displays when we are listening to music, and we use them increasingly to listen to music from the web."
Scoble also says that he just bought a Mac Mini for his living room as well.
At present I'm sort of at a crossroad with my own home entertainment system and will be significantly revamping it in the weeks ahead.
What my set up looks like today is this. In my attic I have a PC which is connected to 3 drobos and a few more external USB hard drives (the drobos and external hard drives basically hold my very extensive media library). This attic PC is connected to a gigabit ethernet network that is deployed through the house.
In the living room I have a Media Center PC, an XBox 360 and a HDTV DirecTV 4 tuner TiVo.
In the kitchen I have a small LCD HDTV connected to a second DirecTV non HD box and then my MacBook Pro floats around with me in other rooms where I'm constantly connected both with a wi-fi network in the house as well as ethernet connections in every room.
So today I use the Media Center PC to grab my music and photos from the attic drobos over the network. I use the XBox 360 to play games (and also to watch DVDs since the DVD player on my HP Media Center PC is simply horrible and only works about 5% of the time). And I use the DirecTV TiVo to record television and watch things when I want.
I also recently signed up for Netflix (which I love) and use this to get new DVDs for viewing and for the "watch now" feature on the Media Center PC.
One of my biggest problems today is in the living room. I'm using a two year
old 43" Pioneer plasma HDTV. The two biggest problems with the Pioneer plasma
are that it is horrible with the inputs (no HDMI and only one component HDTV
-- a big hassle to have to physically switch cables when going from the TiVo
to the XBox 360) and that it is only 720p HDTV...
Continue
reading this article.
About the Author:
Thomas Hawk is a San Francisco based photographer and technology writer.
He publishes the web site Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection and is also
the Evangelist and CEO of the photo sharing site Zooomr.
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