WHAT is a media centre, anyway? Sounds more like a newspaper office than something hooked to your television.
In geek talk, a media centre is a device set up in your lounge room for watching videos and playing music through your television and sound system.
With the line between PCs and audio-visual gear now blurry and this product category poorly defined, media servers and Home Theatre PC (or HTPC) are other terms you'll hear during the current convergence phase.
HTPCs generally play multiple roles as a PC, a digital video recorder and audio-video player.
Media centres come in a wide range of flavours, including computers, game consoles, networked surround-sound amplifiers and networked AV receivers.
Unfortunately, the level of IT know-how required to set up and use media centres remains a barrier to widespread adoption. The idea of hooking up a gadget between a PC and TV is too daunting for too many.
A good media centre lets you play videos and music from the widest possible range of sources and formats with little fuss.
These include videos and music downloaded or streamed from the internet as digital files, tuners for receiving standard and high-definition digital television stations and -- in Australia from next January -- digital radio stations.
A media centre also usually has an optical disc player, which generally supports a wide range of CD, VCD and DVD formats.
These days the best and latest also play Blu-ray discs.
At the very least, you should be able to pension off your DVD player or demote its duties to a second TV in a bedroom.
A computer can perform media centre duties on Windows, Linux or Apple operating systems.
Media centres that are primarily computers can usually do everything a good computer does, such as browse the web, check your emails and use applications from Microsoft Office to Adobe CS3.
A good media centre should not limit what you see or hear to particular online pay-for-download music or video sites.
Beware of such DRM (Digital Rights Management) hamstringing use of a device or content.
Before buying a media centre, check it can stream YouTube and QuickTime videos and that all the video and audio formats and codes you commonly use are supported.
These include Xvid and DivX codec videos, plus audio formats such as MP3, WMA, FLAC, RealAudio and Ogg Vorbis.
Support for internet radio is an increasingly popular feature.
A PC-STYLE media centre should also allow you to access emerging internet television (aka IPTV) and video-on-demand services such as Joost, Veoh, Hulu and Babelgum.
A tuner card can enable a media centre to receive standard and high-definition digital TV, then record and timeshift programs similar to set-top recorders such as the TiVo.
Video and audio files can be stored on the media centre's own hard drive -- 1TB is excellent, 500GB is good and 250GB is OK -- or elsewhere on your network.
For ease of use but restricted functions, there's the Apple TV.
The Pinnacle ShowCenter is a good all-rounder to consider.
For the home-theatre receiver option, look at the Yamaha range for top quality and Onkyo for a competitive price.
A cheap and cheerful media centre can even be made by modifying an old Xbox game console, but tinkering under the hood of any kind of electronic device is best left to the experts.
Buy or beg a second-hand Xbox classic and track down a friendly local techie type who knows how to convert it into an open-source Xbox Media Center -- or XBMC for short. Visit: http://xbmc.org and www.promods.com.au.
The XBMC is hooked between your PC and TV to play downloaded videos and music in a huge range of formats. And games.
It's not pretty but it works well, though fan and hard-drive noise can be an issue.
And even with the modification done to order, you'll still need a heavy-duty geek streak to get it up and running properly. Not recommended for newbies.
Original story by Richard Conrad - Herald Sun 19th March
