Why aren’t more people using Media centers in their homes? I really don’t understand this at all. (and yes, I know that’s the American spelling)

For those who don’t know what this is I will try to give a simple explanation. This is a computer that connects to your TV and receives TV signal. It then provides the interface you see when using your TV and gives you a remote to control it. It adds a huge number of features to your TV and provides a home for all of what you class as your media.

For example, you can pause live TV, because it records to the hard-drive constantly, you can record something just by selecting it in the programme guide and hitting the record button. You can set things up to record upto 2 weeks in advance. Also, for a TV series you can tell it to record the whole series and it will record it without fail. This is great for people like me who would love to watch top gear every week, but often forget or are out. That way you don’t even have to think about it, just go to the recorded TV part of the interface and select the newest one. One you have the whole series you can then archive it off to DVD if you have a DVD burner (and there is no excuse not to have one these days!).

Of course, being a media center, these things don’t just do TV, you can use them to watch DVD’s (hardly smart, but it’s still nice), record, browse and search your music collection and go through your photos. All of this with the remote and a nice easy to use interface (even my mum agrees the interface is very simple).

Of course, this is meant to be the center of all your media, so this really isn’t enough. It acts as a server to anything else in the house that can pick up other media. So you can watch recorded TV on another computer on your network and with the fairly low bandwidth requirements it has you should even be fine on a laptop with wireless.

Thanks to the rise in popularity of these things, (although not as much as I would expect) there are lots more devices springing up to communicate with them and serve media. For example, this little device connects through wireless and accesses your whole music collection and allows you to play anything using its remote. Set up a playlist, or just tell it to go on random through the lot.

To give you an idea of what you can do with this stuff, I will explain what we are going to be setting up in my family’s house.

A Sony VGX-XL302 media center, a separate amplifier as it will be taking the place of the Hi-Fi as it does CD’s, Radio and recorded music which is about all you need these days. The something like the Logitech that I showed a second ago is going to go in the kitchen with a pair of wall mounted speakers. This of course then has full access to all the music we have despite that the TV is in use, and maybe the same CD is being played on a computer upstairs on a different track.

The usefulness of such systems just can’t be underestimated. Maybe I get in 15mins after a TV programme I want to watch has started. Then I can go up to my room, connect in on my computer and start watching from the start, despite that it’s still being watched downstairs, a quarter of an hour advanced.

Now maybe a year ago I would have understood people not being as interested in this kind of technology, it was a bit too noisy, it wasn’t quite fast enough, it still cost a bit too much and to top it off, we were left with the considerable more clunky interface of Windows XP Media center. Oh, and there were almost no twin TV tuners around, so you had to watch whatever you were recording.

Things have changed a bit since then, not least you can get boxes that are under £500 that will do all this (although I will admit you will have to spend a bit more if you want something that looks a bit prettier). Yes, they still have a way to come yet, I would like to see a few more devices to plug into them and better support for some of the newer technologies coming out like HD, but they really are ready for the real world now.

And if you want to be a smart arse, do what I’m doing and convert an old PC into network storage and shove it in your loft out the way.