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Over the past couple of years the “digital home” has grown from being just a neat idea showcased on TV shows like Beyond 2000 to a serious option for those planning or renovating their homes. We have home automation companies advertising on TV and a wealth of computer related options for centralising and accessing your media collection through your TV. So what are the choices for easily accessing all of your music, movies, videos and photos from the comfort of your lounge? The key word is “media centre”. Media centres take a few forms, with the bells and whistles version being Windows Media Centre. Windows Media Centre (WMC) runs on a normal computer, and was previously a version of Windows called Media Centre Edition 2005. WMC is now a part of Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate. If you’re considering building or buying a WMC, make sure you get the Vista based version and not MCE2005 as the later version irons out a lot of bugs and improves compatibility with hardware. Typically you plug your WMC computer into your television, and use a remote control to browse through your music, videos, photos and television in large screen glory! With the inclusion of TV tuner cards in your PC you can watch, record and pause live television, and also set programs to record into the future with the on-screen television guide. Setting up is fairly easy and the time consuming part (if you haven’t done this already) is copying all of your CDs and DVDs to the hard drive of the media centre. Of course, you can also play your collection straight from CD or DVD through the DVDROM of the computer, and if you have files on another computer in your house, you can network the computers and view content on other PCs as well. So what’s the downside? Being a fully fledged computer, WMC’s have a tendency to occasionally crash, or need rebooting, and if something goes wrong and you aren’t a PC hobbyist you may need to get a technician in to help fix an issue. If the thought of a PC in your living room and the expense of a full WMC puts you off, you may like to looks at a Media Gateway device. These are typically smaller units around the size of an external hard drive which have their own storage and also network to your existing PC via cable or wireless. Typically they plug into your TV and enable you to browse your media collection via remote control either on your PC or media you have copied to the unit’s own internal hard drive. Not much goes wrong with these units but they don’t allow the recording of live TV. If your main use for a media centre is to play your digital music (currently stored on your PC) through your HIFI in your living room and view all of your digital photos on your TV then these units are perfect (and relatively inexpensive).
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