2. Choosing A Media Player

From my perspective, all of these solutions were overkill for a number of reasons. The Myth TV and Microsoft solutions were both geared toward putting a hot, noisy, expensive computer into the entertainment center and were chock-full of features that my experience showed I'd probably never use. My basic television requirements were being met by a Satellite PVR system that I'd had a large hand in creating when I worked for the company that designed and built it.

When designing this box, our team had spent time and effort adding weather reports, web browsing, games, stock quotes, etc. These were flashy features we'd show off to family and friends and brag about at trade shows, but after the newness wore off, I found that my family never used them. In addition to being overkill, Microsoft's solution gave me pause for all of the usual reasons; I really didn't want to worry about spy-ware, viruses and patch levels when I just wanted to relax in front of the TV.

As for Apple's Front Row, it appeared to be all of the things that Apple is famous for; it was a beautiful, elegant and expensive solution that would have required me to purchase a complete computer with LCD display just for my entertainment center.

Around the time I was pondering these solutions, I got a chance to review a few networked multimedia devices that took a different approach to the problem. Rather than being a standard PC tailored for multimedia use, they were specialized devices designed exclusively for multimedia use. These were attractive to me for a number of reasons; they were small, low-powered, silent devices that would be able to connect into my network and access my media library.

As I reviewed the ViewSonic Media Adapter (Figure 1), the NETGEAR Wireless Digital Media Player (Figure 2) and the LinkTheater by Buffalo Technology (Figure 3), I learned a few things about the capabilities of these types of devices.

Figure 1:ViewSonic WMA100

In general, they all had a pretty standard feature set consisting of support for digital photo slide shows, music playback and a limited set of video formats. The basic idea is that you run a server on your PC that delivers up multimedia files to the device with your TV being used for the user-interface.

Figure 2: NETGEAR MP115

Figure 3: Buffalo Technology LinkTheater