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Future Trends In Home Computing
James Bell writes: "I just read an interesting article over here that talked about future trends in home computing and what is and isn't driving the home computer market. I thought it was interesting that the author said that more people where adding DVD players and surround sound speakers to their home computer in hopes of makeing it their new home theater. I think a lot of people are bringing their computer to the home theater in the family or media room and converging it that way."
There's a good article, a while back, about quieting down your hotrod. But I'd tend toward just cutting that umbilical cord and having seperate DVD's for the computer and for the Home Entertainment Megaplex.
Biggest driver of trend around my shack is "isn't more bother to deal with."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I think a lot of people are bringing their computer to the home theater in the family or media room and converging it that way.
You're right about that, but I think that this merely marks a transitional period between the "multimedia pc" era (started about 7 years ago) and the "wired home" era (3 years down the road?). Eventually, I think what we'll see is more of a decentralized structure in the home PC area. We're already seeing it today, with wireless e-mail terminals and MP3 audio components for home stereos (a la the RIO Receiver and its bretheren). Look for more integrated versions of these in the future (i.e. wall-mounted touchscreen panels, linked to a file server that pipes MP3 music to any single room in the house).
One of the most compelling reasons to do so is cost. I have been able to purchase a 2x DVD and decoder card combo for my computer for under $40, and a Soundblaster AWE 64 Gold (which has RCA outs instead of mini DIN) for under $20. By running good cabling from the computer out to my living room, I can hook up the DVD to both my stereo and TV, as well as all computer sounds and MP3's, for much less than a standalone solution would cost. In addition, the ability to run cable back and buy mini stereo speakers instead of computer speakers gives me far better computer sound at a much cheaper price.
Instead of TV and radio being listened to over the computer, I find more and more people using the computer to inexpensively and effectively listen to TV / radio / movies.
This is somewhat related. I am looking to buy a HDTV and am wondering if it can be used with my computer in some way? Will it interface with a computer display adapter? I followed the link on this article and someone posted a comment there about using a wireless keyboard/mouse, etc. with a HDTV. This is indeed a nice thought, but will it work? If so, what kind of performance do you get?
I believe that products like the Slimp3 player mentioned yesterday on slashdot are a nice preview of the kinds of technologies that we can expect to have, but will they thrive if the computer is brought into the living room? Is it a cosmetic issue that is keeping a PC from being put in the stereo/video cabinet? If so, what's keeping it from being visually pleasing? A bunch of questions, I guess, but I want to know!
Not only in houses, but in dorm rooms and apartments. Why buy a huge tv, when you can use a 21" monitor hooked up with a dvd player and good speakers? The return on investing in computer parts these days sure beats investing in a huge home theater system.
I personally use my monitor/dvd player and speakers to watch movies in my small little room. You just gotta get a remote.....sux having to get up to rewind the show when you gf goes "What happened there?"
All our entertainment devices are becoming computers. DVD players, CD players, Tivo, and high-end TVs come to mind. Look for a microprocessor or two inside and you will find them. There are too many examples and new ones adding every year.
The computer already snuck into the living room and we did not notice.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
I recently put one together to co-exist with my home theater setup in the living room. A low end machine... 800 MHz Duron, 32MB Radeon, Hauppauge WinTV card (for video capture), 512MB ram, 80G HDD... the whole thing set me back about $700. I painted the case and all front panels black... it fits in quite nicely with the rest of my stereo.
With that system I can now capture video, compress it to mpeg1 (or mpeg2) for burning onto VCD and/or SVCD. I'm copying many of my most played CDs over to it, so I'll have an audio jukebox. I can play non region 1 DVDs. I can read /. on my TV. I can listen to internet radio stations. Pretty much anything I could do before on my office PC, I can do here... but now it's intergrated with my Home Theater.
We had a holiday party last week, so I ripped all of our holiday CDs, downloaded some other songs, recorded some of the "seasonal" music channel on the satellite, created a playlist, and threw it into random mode... and all day the thing happily churned out Christmas music from a fairly large library.
Money well spent so far...
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
A friend of mine had a computer hooked up to receiver (and TV, for onscreen xmms display) for mp3 playback. He gave it one of the modes on his all-in-one remote, installed the IR control module for xmms, and just let it run constantly. He could switch the TV and/or the audio over to the computer at any time, and control all the MP3 playing functions from one of the modes on the remote.
What's the problem with that? It's not like the remote controlled his DVD player perfectly, then screamed "I'm a kludge!" whenever he used it on MP3s.
(he used 320kbit mp3 files and a sound card with digital output, BTW; the sound really wasn't distinguishable from a CD jukebox)
What I ended up with was a surprisingly good looking black case that goes extremely well with the rest of my equipment.
Anyone capable of putting together a computer from scratch really should be able to paint one as well. It's amazingly easy.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
In all seriousness--and I'm a programmer, not a luddite--I'd trade 50% computing power for something that didn't give me fits every few months or so. Every time I have to upgrade something, be it under Linux or Windows, it kills a couple of evenings and involves numerous trips to the store. "Okay, I just bought a new video card because Game X doesn't work with my old one, but then Game Y doesn't work with the new one." Or having to constantly upgrade drivers and worrying that one upgrade might cascade into a whole series of them.
No one has to do this kind of thing with their Palm, cell phone, or DVD player. I'd happily be behind the times in the coming years if I could buy the equivalent of an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 with the capabilities of, say, a bottom line Athlon. Seriously. People were mining the capabilities of the C64 for ten years, and we're talking about something with 500 times the raw capability.
I've tried a few telephony packages, and they have all sucked. The first was whatever came with my dad's computer (Acer Pentium 100, should give you an idea of the time frame) which was real crap. All it had to offer was a bunch of "wacky" prerecorded greetings, basically the same stuff being sold on late-night TV commercials at the time (the 30 second spots, not the spiffy paid programs). Then we tried WinFax Pro (7.0 I think) and it sucked too. It was difficult to configure and not very reliable. It was always confusing voice and fax calls. As an added bonus, it sent the fax handshake before the voice greeting. I'm sure you can imagine how much my Grandmother liked that!
Probably the biggest problem, though, was that with only 1GB HDDs there wasn't that much room for the messages, especially since they were all being recorded at stereo CD quality (roughly 10MB/minute)! Not really an issue these days, especially if the software compressed the messages to MP3 or something.
Anyway, I tried a few of the internet telephony packages when that started up. My conclusion is that there's a pretty good reason you don't hear much about that anymore. I couldn't actually get any of them to work.
The PC entertainment system has interested me for a while, but the remote control problem is definately a barrier, as well as boot time (although since the local power company killed our TV and we've inherited my in-laws old one, I'm not sure it would be that noticable). Of course, as I got older the realization that my life doesn't really require a 24/7 soundtrack crept in and my MP3 collection has seen a lot less use, so the appeal is somewhat diminished. I still like the home theater aspect, though, particularly with a high-res projector. It never occured to me to care about TV res until I got a job testing professional digital video equipment. Full res HDTV is really jaw-dropping.
Hmm... kinda strayed from my point, but I guess that just means I only have to post once on this topic :)
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I put together a P233 with a 17" Monitor and Home Stereo Speakers driven off a small 40 Watt Car Audio Amp that was powered from the 12 Volt leads on my computer Power Supply (Some small Capacitor Mods needed for cleanliness).
This Unit served as my Computer, Internet Surfer, CD/Wav/MP3 Player, TV, Video Recorder (athough space was real tight if you wanted more than one show), and most importantly my Gaming Machine. After I got a VCR, It would play movies as well as my new Play Station. It looked better than a TV in fullscreen mode, and sounded great. It was more than enough to satisfy a geek cramped in a little pad, and impressed all my friends that came to visit and play Tekken.
There are many good and bad points to having a setup like this though. For a single guy in school its great, but any more than that would require more than one PC. (IE. Woman wants TV, I want Web.)
I now have an actual Entertainment center (Mostly for the Woman) and two Entertainment PCs. When I decided I needed more processing power, I designed my new unit with all the same features. It's a bit better of course with a 19" Monitor, DVD-Rom, better video in/out, and an 80 Watt amp, but the idea is the same.
As for the old 233, I upgraded it to a 450 and gave it some other new equipment. Now it's known as the bedroom box. Perfect for TV in bed, watching movies, Musical Alarm Clock, and checking slashdot before coffee.
As for the market on this idea, the only thing to say is slow. I work at Local PC sales and repair shop and I suggested building Home Entertainment PCs as part of our sales line. I could make them for a reasonable price, but the salesmen just could'nt move them out very well. Most people were not intrested because they already have a nice Entertainment Center. They want a PC at a good price and thats it. As to be expected, the only people that wanted our HEPCs was the soon to be college student who was going to be stuck in the dorms for a couple years, a few geeks that wanted everything and more, and a few old guys that found them perfect for hiding in their shop/study/office away from the wife. The rest of the market just was'nt ready.
If time allows, maybe I'll recap this post on TQY3, with some pictures and better descriptions of my experience with HEPC's.
Opinions Expressed by Me should be Forced on Others - PbHead
Bingo!
Until people have a need/use for a home server, 24/7 applications (like answering machine, possibly alarm system, home control, etc.) aren't going to happen. Of course, there is no need for a home server if there are no apps to run on it 24/7 so you have a chicken and egg problem... what is the "killer app" for the home server?
email
The thought of connecting and polling some remote POP/IMAP/whatever server for email periodically sucks: I (or some application) wants to know I have email the instant it is delivered to my mailbox. This is kind of a pain with a dial-up connection (and keeping it up is likely a violation of the terms of service unless you have a dedicated connection), but very easy to do if you have a cable or DSL connection. One of the first things I did when I got my DSL connection was configure my PC to sink email for my domain (yes, I have a remote backup MX; no, I do not relay) and adjust my DNS records accordingly. This humble P200 PC will soon be relegated to the headend where it will serve as an email/media server.
Of course, an answering machine is little more than a repository for email with a voice attachment in disguise, so, with the right modem, this becomes a slam dunk. Remote monitoring of the house (sensors, webcams, etc.) is the next logical step. While we're at it, might as well provide remote ssh-tunneled access to that email and voice mail.
This is just the start, really. For example, why do TiVo and ReplayTV need hard disks? Shouldn't they just stream to local home storage (perhaps encrypting the content to keep the MPAA sharks at bay, not that I'd like this)? I see a potential revival of "push" technology services, when the possibility of caching, i.e. time-shifting, content becomes the norm.
Hard drives are noisy, and frankly computers are ugly in a family/livingroom setting. It might be reasonable for streamed media playback devices to accept local CD, DVD, or other media, but it makes little sense for them to cache locally -- cache on the home server. With less as opposed to more integration in such devices, planned obsolescence becomes easier: you aren't throwing out a whole computer when you upgrade an essentially integrated component. A plus: storage becomes independent of content -- you grow storage as you want.
You could've hired me.
I'm planning out the A/V network to run alongside the ethernet one. It'd basically end up with the DVD on channel 1, MP3/DivX/VCD's from the dedicated media computer on 2, the hacked satellite on 3, my work computer screen on 4 (goes nicely with the wireless keyboard and mouse!), the surveillance camera outside the front door on 5 (hmmm, ThinkGeek sells remote controlled deadbolts), etc, etc. Run that coax line to all the rooms and you can show whatever you want on any TV. The expensive part is the equipment that merges the RCA A/V lines onto the coax. But nearly all of it could be controlled from a single universal remote and some inventive programming.
Next goal is to try and put the landline phone and my cellphone into the mix.
Dyolf Knip
Your pretty quick to just dismiss the value of a PC in a home theater system. Your points are valid but only because the better solutions are not obvious. I still firmly believe that you're better off purchasing a dedicated DVD player but the experience of using a computer on a TV can be greatly improved as follows:
1) Remotes
There are many options here and many of them are better than kludgy. I personally use a cheapy Packard Bell Fastmedia remote that can be purchase for between $9-15 online or at computer shows. It consists of a cheapy receiver and a remote. There are even better solutions out there especially for a geeks home theater. Some contain IR receivers and transmitters, allowing you to customize macros and control more than the computer and the components. The biggest problem with these solutions are not the remotes themselves but A/V equipments general lack of a singal standard for connecting multiple devices together to act as one devices (would be nice to power on the DVD player and automatically select the input, audio configuration and picture adjustments).
I personally use a program called Girder to control my win box. Another popular program for linux is Lirc.
2) Sound Quality
Newer sound cards have improved drastically in terms of SQ but you are correct, the minijack is less than ideal and computers in general add noise to the mix. For a better solution connect you computer to your A/V receiver using one of the digital audio inputs. This removes the possibility of the minijack or the computer itself adding noise to the analog signal (most newer A/V receivers have digital inputs that use an internal DAC). Mp3s may not be the ultimate in high fidelty, but for most pop music its good enough and having a huge library online for casual listening is worth the trade off.
3) Video Quality
This is as much a fault of the computer as it is the fault of the TV. Most TV-Out capable video cards have pretty crappy picture quality, in fact I've yet to see one that knocked my socks off. Dedicated VGA converters generally do a better job, but are expensive and probably still won't give a picture as good as a $200 DVD player. But for the lucky few who have HDTVs there is hope. Some HDTV's come standard with a VGA or RGB interface and this is the ideal solution for hooking up your computer to such a set. For me, my HDTV doesn't have a VGA connector so instead I have to use a VGA->Y/Pb/Pr (component) transcoder. Using one of these transcoders provides a signal cleaner than any VGA out I've ever seen plus it allows me to use HD resolutions.
I don't recommend using a computer as a primary source in a home theater, but having a PC in the mix can be quite useful. Being able to control an entire home theater, being able to play mp3s and being able to play mame on a large tv make pretty compelling reason to throw a CPU into the cabinet. The AVSForum - HTPC (Home Theater PC) forum has many people who have a PC connected for various reasons.
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing