Background:
Computers are ideal for collecting, storing, organizing and presenting digital material and you'd expect to see more computers in the family room except for one thing -- computer gear is butt ugly in the eyes of most women and very few would allow a PC and its accompanying wires in the family room.
The computer industry recognized this fact and for a while there was a push to cloak the PC in a veil of living room acceptability by making the standard IBM PC case look like a cool home stereo amplifier. I remember articles in PC magazines on how to build a media PC in your old Sony tuner case. I never did come across one that looked or sounded like anything but a PC in a home stereo box -- and you still had the mouse and keyboard issues to deal with.
Several solutions to this problem have emerged over the past few years. For the very rich there is the home theatre setup where you can hide all the gear in attractive cabinets, and for the rest of us there is the Media Extender. These small, silent boxes about the size of an average hard cover book can be placed pretty much anywhere in the house without giving offence to other family members -- and because they are driven by a remote, there are no mouse/keyboard issues to contend with.
Take for example the extender I've settled on -- the Linksys DMA2100 shown below tucked under my TV -- is a very tidy little box.
You gotta admit - that's pretty unobtrusive.
Not all extenders are created equal:
My idea of a Windows Media Center Media Extender was a box that sits next to the TV in the lounge and delivers the same WMC experience that I enjoyed on office PC. My first stab at this goal was to put a laptop next to the TV, run a copy of WMC on it, and use the network to run the material from the media server in my office.
This proved to be much too fiddly and I quickly abandoned it.
The next step was to investigate the low cost extenders - mostly made by companies I'd never heard of. Apparently the big names have gotten out of the market according to a local PC retailer friend of mine.
I soon found that many so called media extenders on the economy side are simply players delivering photos, music, and movies. The cheapest of these players that I tested didn't even do those jobs very well - playing some formats and not others -- or even playing some files of a given format (.JPGs for example) and not playing others. No error message or reason provided as to why one .JPG would play and another, seemingly idenitical .JPG would not. The Western Digital unit (below) is reputed to be a good player, but I haven't had a chance to test it yet.
Moving a step up in price I found the ASUS. It did the job of a player, and because it had a LAN interface it could play media located on the media server in my office using a hard-wired connection with only a hint of latency. But it lacked the essential wife-friendly user interface critical for any new technology hopeing to extend it's popularity beyond the confines of a male home office.
Determined to test a proper extender I headed down to our local Dick Smith Electronics (www.dse.co.nz -- they are to New Zealand what Radio Shack is to the US) and picked up a Linksys Media Center Extender DMA2100 for $349.00 (NZ). After about a half hour playing around with the configuration I was delighted to find that the Linksys delivers a Windows Media Center experience to the lounge that is identical to the WMC experience delivered to my office.
Looks like I'll be selling the ASUS on TradeMe (our version of eBay) as all the features that make Windows Media Center such a great application -- good looks, ease of use, range of media compatibilities -- are now faithfully delivered to the family tele with a remote that even a wife can use.
Setup:
I was hoping to make this a substantial portion of this post, but sadly, the setup is just too easy.
According to the instructions, setup is as simple as getting an 8-digit code from the PC setup screen and typing it into your extender - if this doesn't work you may be required to enter some setup numbers by hand, but it's all pretty straight-forward for the Linksys and there appears to be plenty of support documentation on the Cisco site (written for Vista, but appears to apply to Windows 7 as well).
From that point the media extender provides access to all the material on your Windows Media Center PC.
It's important to note, however, that an HDMI cable (essential for best quality viewing) is not included in the pack. An economy model 1.5 meter HDMI can set you back $40.00 in New Zealand
Performance:
Second only to a spousal approval is performance. Latency is the deal-buster for streaming media so although the Linksys supports wireless networking to 802.11n, experience tells me that a hard wire is always better (where practical). Thus far, the Linksys has been very smooth -- even when playing different movies on the two TVs. As to the number of extenders that can be attached to a single server - one model I took a quick look at mentioned a figure of 9 per - but I guess if you have to install more than two extenders in your home, the price and the limit probably aren't an issue.
Tip: Movie Poster Screen Saver
My wife is an old-fashioned gal and she could live quite happily in the pre-computer era of the 1950's. I'm the opposit -- I'd be quite happy as a crewman on the USS Enterprise. While my office is my own high-tech domain, moving the benefits of technology out into the rest of our home is no easy feat and I have to find ways to "sell" the technology before I install it.
My wife also likes movies (not the tech movies, of course, but other stuff) so one way to sell the extender was to extract out the movie posters provided with each movie in my library and copy them to a separate folder (e.g. "My Movie Posters" for example) and then set the screen saver on the extended to run these images as a screen saver. Providing that you've got a few "chick flicks" in your collection the slide show should attract a bit of interest from other family members and provide an approval path for greater and greater use of this mightly little box.
Update:
Since this post was written I've experienced a couple of problems with my Linksys DMA2200. The first occured as I plugged an extended (6 meter) HDMI cable into the unit which resulted in the whole unit locking up and I had to hit the "reset" button and reload the configuration data to bring it back to life - I went back to the 1 meter HDMI cable and the box recovered fully from that experience.
The second fault occured when I attempted to play an AVI movied that I had just added to my collection - about a minute into the show the image and sound began to "stutter" so badly as to make the movie unwatchable - other movies played normally so perhaps there are some issues with that particular file (although it plays normally on my office gear).
Links:
Linksys DMA2200 Media Center Extender on YouTube
REVIEW: Linksys DMA 2100 Media Center Extender on YouTube
Linksys DMA2200 Media Extender plummets from $350 to $95
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