Remember those pathetic “Media PC” offerings from Gateway that came out right around the time DVD drives, audio cards and video cards emerged on the computer market?
Those old packages were nothing other than a TV screen and nice speakers connected to a normal PC with a wireless keyboard.
But, good news – over the next year, computers are going to grow from pimply-faced entertainment PCs to sleek, streamlined entertainment purveyors with specially designed operating systems and features to beat all of their stand-alone counterparts at Best Buy.
The first iterations of most new technologies will all be making their debuts this holiday season to make these new entertainment PCs a reality. Once refined, they will continue to push computers ever closer to your family room and further from your home office.
Computers these days can just about match everything the highest-end audio/video hardware can muster. High definition DVD and video playback? Ha! Computers have used high-def resolutions for years. High definition audio and multichannel audio? Ha! The new Sound Blaster Audigy audio cards offer 96-bit audio (better than CD quality) and multichannel decoding for a fraction of the price of a traditional audio receiver. Digital audio and video recording? Check.
The two most exciting new technologies that will make media PCs an even better choice than traditional hardware are 802.11G and Intel’s new Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading technology.
802.11g is the next iteration of the wireless data transfer standard known as Wi-Fi, and will provide a 120-foot range at a 2.4 GHz frequency. This will allow your entertainment PC to take advantage of online pay-per-view services such as cinemanow.com, where for $3.99 you can currently download “Harry Potter” for 24 hours of unlimited viewings.
Hyper Threading, to debut on Intel’s 3.09 GHz Pentium 4, allows a computer to divide the processor into two virtual processors, allowing the computer to, for instance, play a DVD while simultaneously encoding digital video from the TV source. But for now, only Windows XP can take advantage of HT.
The backbone of the new Media Center PC will be the Windows XP Media Center Edition, available next month. The Media Center Edition was designed to make great new hardware available for computers easy to manage from a remote control.
The centerpiece of the Media Center Edition will be a remote control that streamlines all the features of the enhanced media PCs. These features include (in order of coolness) the ability to pause live television, digital TV recording (with all the bells and whistles to compete with TiVo), DVD and MP3 playback, digital picture slide shows, and digital video playback.
While all of these features have been available, never before has a special operating system been made to organize them all into one sleek, easy-to-use package. With the touch of one button, the computer will switch to media center mode (from the normal Windows desktop environment).
People don’t generally place televisions near their computers (except in dorms), but if companies start making horizontal towers instead of vertical ones, that might change.
The first model to be installed with Windows XP Media Center Edition will come from Hewlett Packard, and despite the shivers you might get from the company’s bland PC designs in the past, the new Media Center PCs are outright sleek with a black glass (or look-alike) front, shiny silver buttons and ports.
The only possible kidney stone in our vas deferentia is Microsoft’s Palladium and its Intel-developed hardware complement, LaGrande. These two dastardly technologies could be used to stamp out all traces of freedom with digital media that we currently enjoy (i.e. ripping and burning CDs, and downloading digital media). But Palladium and LaGrande are in such infantile stages that we don’t need to worry quite yet.
Suffice it to say that Microsoft will be the biggest force behind this revolution and will consequently try to mark its digital territory like a dog on a fire hydrant.