What Happened to Media PCs?

timrichardson writes to tell us that Slate is asking what happened to the promises of a living room PC? The lack of any news at Apple's WWDC prompted the author to look at the promises made at the Consumer Electronics Show a la Viiv and other "uber-consoles" in addition to the launch of Apple's downloadable videos and "couch-surfing remote." While some pundits blame the state of the technology this article claims that the PC and the TV provide two very different roles that aren't going to converge anytime soon.

Comments

Worldwide DEVELOPER Conference

[dduardo]

It wasn't shown for the same reason new ipods weren't shown: they are consumer products. Wait for Macworld.

All-In-Wonder?

[ben there...]

Start off with the latest and greatest ATI All-in-Wonder. That can cost at least $300, usually more towards $500. Sorry, Nvidia can't compete with ATI in the multimedia realm. Not yet, anyways. People are going to want to play games, and impress their friends. And you need that video input/output functionality. Sure, you could use seperate cards, but this solution is more elegant.

Why would you get an ATI card? ATI is not the leader in either TV Tuners or Video Cards.

For TV Tuners, you can get an equivalent Hauppauge PVR150MCE for $30, or go with the Fusion HDTV if you want digital. And as far as nVidia in the TV tuner market, they recently released the DualTV, with 2 tuners, which beats anything ATI has produced, and gives the Hauppauage PVR500 a run for its money.

For the video card, nVidia has all the hardware accelerated MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoding, starting with 6xxx (fanless, silent, low profile 6200 is $30).

Re:Technologically informed != Techo-fetishist

[swillden]

You don't need an expensive renamed gaming rig to do those, and you don't need the whirring of its fans and hard drives while you watch a movie.

OTOH, an appropriately small, low-powered, silent computer by the TV, with a noisy file server in the closet, makes a fantastically nice movie jukebox. I set mine up primarily because I was tired of damaged DVDs, but until you've seen it you don't realize just how convenient it is to choose what you want to watch from an on-screen menu. *Everyone* who has seen mine has asked how they could get one.

So, actually, there is something to the argument that people don't want one because they're technically uninformed. That's only part of it, because when people I know actually look into getting one for themselves, they get put off by the cost and complexity. I have two brothers who are actually doing it, but that doesn't count because they're something of low-level geeks anyway.