Your Home, Your Media
Your digital media collection is meant to be enjoyed across more than just your PC. There are various options that get your media off your PC and into the living room.
If you have a collection of digital media then there are many ways to get it onto your television. The simplest involves using some form of removable storage like a portable hard drive or memory stick. For those who want to get the most from their media, networking your entertainment and computing devices is the easy and ideal solution.
Thankfully this doesn't require a computer technician. Manufacturers have learned that in order to sell products they need to make sure that they work together quickly and easily. In the past this hasn't necessarily been the case. However nowadays there are various standards in place to make life easier.
DLNA is the way
Perhaps the most important of these standards come from the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA). This is an industry body that has been around for seven years now and comprises all the big players in the consumer electronics and PC worlds. The goal of this alliance is to make sure the diverse gadgets in your living room all talk to each other without fuss.
What this means in practice is that if you have a DLNA certified television and a DLNA supporting PC, you can just access your media collection straight from the TV. In the past this would have involved connecting a PC directly to the television and manually playing files. With DLNA certified products your TV will look on your home network, automatically recognise the PC as a media server and allow you to access the media from your remote control.
This is a very basic example, there are many different devices that you can add to the mix. But the principle is the same. DLNA devices will talk to each other, recognise where there is media being stored, and allow you access directly from the playback device.
Like many things in the home, the new era of home media works best with a computer network connecting the parts. This allows you to get the most out of the movies, pictures and music that are currently just sitting on your PC or Mac.
The network
To make the most of your media you will likely need a mix of wired and wireless networking. You ideally want to connect your main devices to a wired network, while wireless is handy for attaching devices like mobile phones and remote controls to the system.
Media servers
The heart and soul of a home media network is the server. By centralising all your media in this one place you allow any device access to it, rather than it being stuck on different devices. A media server can be a dedicated network storage device, your PC or even a network capable PVR.
Network attached storage (NAS) devices are the best option for holding your media. These are basically external hard drives that plug directly into the network. Not only are they a great place to centralise your media, but they are a good location for family members to make regular backups of their data. Devices such as the Western Digital My Book World or the DLNA-certified Netgear STORA MS2110 hard drive are good examples of home NAS boxes, and perfect stores of digital media. One thing to keep in mind is the capacity. With a media collection bigger is always better, and you should be looking in the region of one terabyte (TB) or more of storage.
If you have sufficient storage available on your PC then this is also a decent option. The major problem with relying on your PC as a media server is that it must be turned on in order for you to see it on the network. Leaving your PC on 24/7 isn't great for power consumption and is less than ideal for your PC's general health. If you do go down this route, Windows 7 has good support for file sharing, and will act as a DLNA digital media server with some quick and easy changes in the networking setup screen.
Power of the PVR
Another option is to have your PVR act not only as a recording device, but as a media server as well. Some models of PVR are quite flexible in how they treat the recordings they make. This can turn your PVR into a media powerhouse. The latest version of the Topfield 2400 PVR for example combines the ability to watch one channel while recording three others with DLNA certification. It even allows you to add an external hard drive directly to the PVR via a standard ESATA connection to increase the amount of storage.
One thing to keep in mind with PVRs, though, is that a lot of models on the market will restrict what you can do with recorded content. Generally speaking those that support the Freeview episodic program guide will be more restricted than those that don't support it. Topfield's offering for example comes with a 3 month Ice TV subscription instead of Freeview support.
Playback devices
As time goes on more and more televisions will gain the ability to access networked media directly. Such is the case with DLNA certified televisions. However if you don't have such a television then there are various options out there to get access to your media collection.
One may already be sitting in your living room. Both Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 game consoles can also act as networked media players. Both are DLNA compliant and capable of outputting high definition video. If your primary love is media rather than gaming, the PlayStation 3 has an edge as it is also a Blu-ray player, whereas the Xbox 360 only supports DVDs.
Rise of the media player
There are also a growing number of standalone media players available. These boxes are designed to plug into your network and connect to your TV. They come with their own remote controls and interface for navigating your media collection. Netgear's Digital Entertainer Express and Western Digital's DLNA compliant WDTV HD Live are examples of such devices. These also usually have USB ports for attaching external hard drives as well. This comes in handy when friends drop by and want to show off some of their photos or movies.
You could also connect a PC directly to your television. Most versions of Windows 7 come with Windows Media Centre, which is media player designed to be viewed from far away. This uses Windows Media Player to access your media collection and provide playback through your TV. This is becoming a less ideal solution with the rise of more specialised products like those mentioned above.
Online content services
Elsewhere in the world there has been an explosion in video on demand services. This hasn't reached critical mass yet in Australia thanks to the quality of broadband services, monthly download caps and pricing, but there is an inevitability that the internet will become one of the major sources of the video you watch at home.
You could also connect a PC directly to your television. Most versions of Windows 7 come with Windows Media Centre, which is media player designed to be viewed from far away. This uses Windows Media Player to access your media collection and provide playback through your TV. This is becoming a less ideal solution with the rise of more specialised products like those mentioned above.
Most playback devices already tout support for free online video services like Youtube. While the method of streaming the video to you is similar, video on demand services generally cost you money and deliver much higher quality videos. Rather than trudge down to the video shop to hire a DVD, you can connect to the internet, choose a video and watch it. There are even high definition services about; although the size of these movies will make a serious dent in your monthly bandwidth allowance (a HD movie can come in around 15GB in size).
More and more companies are trying to get around this problem by negotiating deals with ISPs. For example, TiVo offers an extra video on demand service for its PVRs. It currently has deals with Internode, iinet, iPrimus and Adam Internet through which all its content is unmetered and will not count towards your monthly bandwidth. This eliminates a lot of the hidden cost from using video on demand services.
Media formats
One of the most complex aspects of using a digital media collection is the diverse numbers of file types out there. Over the years there have been many ways to compress audio and video. This determines what kind of device can play the file and is important to keep in mind.
Most media playback devices will cope with a vast array of video and audio types. These commonly include MP3, MP4, Ogg, FLAC, MPEG 2, DivX, MPEG-4, h264. WMV and Mov files but there are many lesser types that are commonly supported.
Where one is likely to run into issue is with files protected with Digital Rights Management. Designed as a means of copy protection, DRM will often limit playback of files in some way. A common example of this is Apple's iTunes, which locks songs to certain devices and players. Similarly most PVRs will limit you to watching shows back on the same device. If your file collection does include DRM protected files then you will likely need a specific type of playback device or software in order to use them.
Source: TechLiving Issue 4 – Winter 2010
