Eliminating The PC
As readers keep on following my blog, one trend I favor seems to be quite visible. To eliminate the PC. I have covered many gadgets with various functions and most of the time these functions could be handled by a PC. Be it a file server or a firewall / router or a gaming console, you can have them all implemented as a software running on a general purpose personal computer. But is this really a good approach?Last week I was completing version 2 of my living room setup. I ended up with a Full HD LCD screen with a HDMI input (boy, they are cheap now!). The HDMI input is coming from a Denon AVR-2308 audio amplifier (featuring HDMI 1.3a switch / repeater). The Denon strips audio signals from the HDMI stream to power speakers and passes video up to the TV Screen. There are two HDMI inputs on the Denon - one is connected to the Sony Playstation 3 console and the other to the Sony VAIO VGX-XL100 so - called a "living room PC" running Windows Media Center.
There is an enormous user experience gap between the Playstation and the Media PC. Playstation boots instantly, requires no setup and plays games, Blue-Ray, DVD, music, pictures from the ReadyNAS DLNA/ UPnP server. The PC - on the other hand - kept me for six hours with the Windows setup and later I spent similar amount of time trying to adjust underscan / overscan ratios of the NVidia graphics unit until it really started to fit the native 1920x1080 resolution of the LCD screen. Now after being set up, the living room PC boots for a minute or two (I cannot turn it on with the supplied remote) just to present more or less the same functionality as the Playstation. The bottom line is obvious. PC's - while universal - deliver more hassles than features to ordinary users.
One of the difference + making gadgets I follow for a while is the Eye-Fi WiFi/SD card. The Eye-Fi guys took the original concept of a combo WiFi/SD card and exteded it with some clever software that lets us upload pictures directly from a digital camera to one of the photo - sharing sites (Flickr, Picasa), eliminating the PC from the picture transfer path. With this ingenious move, many more happy users will enter the world of digital photography. In many areas elimination of the PC's enables new users.
Hey Szy,
ReplyDeleteYour writeups are a continual source of enlightenment and they prep'd me as I'm preparing to completely renovate my family room downstairs to integrate my audio and new HDTV. I've studied the Denon and it's competitors, and ater looking at the features of different models, including Sony and Onkyo, I took the plunge and bought the Denon. But I probably bit off too much, as I settled on the 4308ci. I just couldn't resist the ENet & USB ports and the GUI. My setup will be much less complex than your two-home redundant setup. I looked for and found a drawing of your configuration back in 2006. Do you plan to update it?
Thanks,
eek
Hi eek,
ReplyDeleteYes, sure, it is in the process of being upgraded. I should be posting the upgraded setup in a few weeks. It has been delayed a bit, as I had some issues with the new DFL-800 router. This is now resolved by DLink, so may find its way to the public :). For WiFi I still use the WAP-54G from Linksys, as after years of struggle with unreliable WiFi connections, I did not want to experiment with another unknown technologies like the 802.11n pre-release.
And I too was attracted by the 4308, but there was one simple reason I had to abandon that idea - it was simply too fat to fit on my shelf :). On the other hand I just plan to use the Logitech Squeezeboxes Duo (they are just now available to preorder). I think the Logitech UI and the Duo remote will beat the Denon when it comes to ease of use. Still not sure the Duos will run well with the ReadyNAS, as they require Squeezecenter 7.0 on the server and Infrant / Netgear ships with 6.5...
ReplyDeleteStill, you must have fun with your Denon :)