I was reading about the Mediaconnect TV box with Intel’s CE 3100 processor built that is Mini ITX device running a Linux based OS. It supports digital audio, 1080p video and you can add tuners, wifi and a web browser. This got me thinking about the ongoing issue with Extenders and Media Centers market position. Imagine this device running as a dedicated Windows Media Center system, you would have the option of adding tuners and it could share content with other Windows /DLNA devices.
Whether it would be possible to get Media Center running on a low power device and at the right price point remains to be seen and of course whether there is a market for a headless Media Center device is another good question. The combination of a small lower power headless device and a Windows Home Server could be the model that replaces the Extender system, it would not be reliant of OEMs making Media Center specific extenders and with it being a PC it could run services like BBC iPlayer, Netflix and Hulu so the device could be more flexible than the current generation of extenders.
So would that be a device that you would be interested in? Is there not the market for such as device? I know we have talked about this kind of device before but its nice to speculate…
0 thoughts on “Metrological’s Mediaconnect TV points to a PC based CE future?”
i don’t know what this device will cost, but thats the kind of hardware i would imagine for an extender if WHS integrates tuners!
it is powerfull enough to do the uncoding of 1080p files and to run a softsled media center, so WHS would only serve which makes it much more stable.
and, as you write, it can run other software(BBC iplayer,…)
but in this case there would be no tuners in this thing!!
Actually it is a possibillity to use tuners on WHS. It is just another operating system based on the XP core.
Procedure would be to build your own WHS Server with suffucient space for pci devices, and have it share its tuners to remote clients that run at localmediacenters. This can be achieved by installing DVBlogic on the server allongside DVBviewer(Using DVBviewer Server). All clients would then have access to networked tuners. And you would have the option to delegate control to as to how many tuners each client should have available.
I wouldn’t be interested in one of these TVs because whatever I buy is going to be out of date within 2 years. I’ve always thought of TVs as 20-30 year devices. There is no way that internal circuity will keep up with what I want to do over the next 2 decades. That is why I favor the TV being simply a standalone monitor with an extender doing all of the heavy lifting. In a few years the extender will be out of date, but cheaper and easier to replace.
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i don’t know what this device will cost, but thats the kind of hardware i would imagine for an extender if WHS integrates tuners!
it is powerfull enough to do the uncoding of 1080p files and to run a softsled media center, so WHS would only serve which makes it much more stable.
and, as you write, it can run other software(BBC iplayer,…)
but in this case there would be no tuners in this thing!!
extenders need to get more power
Actually it is a possibillity to use tuners on WHS. It is just another operating system based on the XP core.
Procedure would be to build your own WHS Server with suffucient space for pci devices, and have it share its tuners to remote clients that run at localmediacenters. This can be achieved by installing DVBlogic on the server allongside DVBviewer(Using DVBviewer Server). All clients would then have access to networked tuners. And you would have the option to delegate control to as to how many tuners each client should have available.
I wouldn’t be interested in one of these TVs because whatever I buy is going to be out of date within 2 years. I’ve always thought of TVs as 20-30 year devices. There is no way that internal circuity will keep up with what I want to do over the next 2 decades. That is why I favor the TV being simply a standalone monitor with an extender doing all of the heavy lifting. In a few years the extender will be out of date, but cheaper and easier to replace.