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What To Do With That Old PC?
(Part I of a 2 part series on bringing digital content to the living room by virtue of that old PC)
By William S. Herz If the average person buys a new PC every 2 years, what happens to all of the leftovers?
Many are put in children’s rooms. Some are donated. In California, computer leftovers are commonly put in the trash for special “E-waste” pickups. One idea is to convert that PC into the ultimate digital media device. In this context, a digital media device is a box that takes in multimedia (audio, video, pictures, and text) from the internet, other computers, or storage devices on a wireless network and converts this digital data into a high quality audio and video experience through your A/V receiver and through your HDTV/TV respectively.
For illustrative purposes, consider a 5 year old laptop, running Windows XP on a Pentium 4 at 1.7 GHz with a DVD/CD drive. For video, the laptop is connected to the HDTV through the TV’s DVI (digital) or composite TV (analog) input. Similarly, for audio, the laptop is connected to the AV receiver’s SPDIF (digital) or stereo mini (analog) input. Next, the laptop is set up so that it can be closed, yet still be on; disabling the open/close power switch and its LCD display. The benefit of closing the laptop is that it can be easily hidden away in the home theater rack and does not consume as much electricity by continually illuminating its embedded LCD.
You’re probably thinking how can I do anything with a PC that I cannot see? There are 3 approaches:
• Wireless (infrared or Bluetooth (RF)) keyboard and mouse while displaying on the connected home theater display. Obviously, this should be set up prior to closing the laptop and putting in the home theater rack.
• Remote Desktop by using another computer on the home network. Remote Desktop is a Microsoft utility included in all XP and XP Professional systems. It enables the user to virtualize the desktop of one PC onto another. This provides complete control and visual feedback of the user interface (Windows desktop) of the living room laptop, while being situated at any other machine on the network. It is like hijacking the target PC and running it locally on another machine. See http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/mobility/getstarted/remoteintro.mspx for assistance with setting up Remote Desktop.
• Treating the laptop as a Digital Media Adapter (DMA) where it is a thin client or remote rendering device for larger scale processing devices. Connection can be achieved through Windows Media Connect (Windows Media Player 11), or other DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) compliant software. Content can be pushed to the laptop, as well as pulled or solicited from the laptop.
In the most simplistic application, the laptop can be used exclusively as a DVD and CD player without any connection to broadband or the home network. For convenience, there are software packages available that enable DVD and CD playback and respond to a remote control. This is in case you would like to control the playback with a remote control, rather than with a mouse and keyboard. Taken even further up the convenience ladder, ripping unprotected content to the hard drive enables this laptop to become an audio/video jukebox without having to load CDs or DVDs.
Once a home network is introduced, this somewhat closed entertainment system opens up to a virtually unlimited content repository and portal. Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices are hard disk drives which are connected to the home network through wired or wireless means. Think of it as introducing more and more storage to the living room laptop (and any other PC in the house), but is not physically inside of the living room laptop. Typically, NAS devices can be daisy chained, so a user can continually introduce more and more storage as the need arises. Present hard disk drive costs are roughly $.20 to $.30 per gigabyte and dropping rapidly. This translates into about $1.00 to store the contents of 1 DVD. Obviously the content on the NAS device can be uploaded or sourced from other devices on the home network and even outside of the home.
Advantageously, when the home network is connected to broadband (high speed internet), all kinds of content services open up. Consider the following examples of music or audio services:
• Napster
http://free.napster.com/
Monthly unlimited streaming of any track or purchase per track. Free streaming available.
• Rhapsody
http://www.rhapsody.com/home.html
Monthly streaming of any track or purchase per track. Free streaming and radio channels available.
• iTunes
http://www.apple.com/itunes/overview/
Purchase per track.
• Sirius Satellite Radio http://www.sirius.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Sirius/CachedPage&c=Page&cid=1018209032790
Subscriber based streaming of multiple channels, (including Howard Stern) without special hardware.
• XM Satellite Radio
http://xmro.xmradio.com/xstream/index.jsp
Subscriber based streaming of multiple channels without special hardware.
• Audible
http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/homepage/AnonHome.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=Yes
Downloadable audio books.
• Miscellaneous RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication) and online news, entertainment, and radio stations, all providing audio instantiations of the content.
All of these can be accessed on the living room laptop and fed through the AV receiver and its accompanying high fidelity speakers for a fairly high quality experience. More importantly though, is the ability to virtualize incredible amounts (literally millions of tracks and segments) of audio content into the living room, almost as if the infrastructure had designed it to be there.
(Part 1 of a 2 part series on bringing digital content to the living room by virtue of that old PC) ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What To Do With That Old PC
(Part 2 of a 2 part series on bringing digital content to the living room by virtue of that old PC)
Only until recently was there a reason for bringing additional video, more specifically video delivered by computer to the living room. After all, cable, terrestrial, and satellite TV feeds were usually found in the living room. With the introduction and explosion of online or internet video, the desire to view the content in the living room is also growing.
Content can vary from an individual’s cell phone captured video of the wind blowing to a professional HDTV version of Alex Rodriquez’s 500th career home run. From the esoteric to the Main street of pop culture, internet video is heading in the direction of any content, anywhere, at anytime.
If you want to watch your favorite out of market baseball team play live, it’s out there. See www.mlb.com.
Many PC and PC/CE convergence technology companies have introduced $200+ digital media adapters to enable the transference of internet video content to a dedicated and specialized device to connect to the living room TV/HDTV. Apple has introduced Apple TV to be the presentation device of iTunes, their internet video and audio distribution hub or portal. TV manufacturers are designing this function into their HDTVs. Sony’s Playstation 3 will allow internet browsing and playback of streaming video. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 enables movies, TV shows, and specialized content to be streamed or downloaded from the internet.
Not surprisingly, most of the video content described above is accessible by a PC. However, because the content was encoded or processed to achieve low bandwidth (data rate), low latency (no streaming interruption), and minimal storage, even a 5 year old laptop can effectively process this video. Because of the reasons mentioned, the typical home wireless network can also support delivering this video content from the cable or DSL modem to the living room laptop. As mentioned in Part 1 of this article, the 3 methods of controlling the living room laptop (wireless keyboard and mouse, Remote Desktop and Digital Media Adapter software) are still applicable for video. Also, as mentioned previously, with the advent of Network Attached Storage (NAS), previously stored audio and video can be accessed by the living room laptop and played through the AV receiver and TV/HDTV. This avoids any storage limitations of the living room laptop.
When 35 mm film slides were the primary medium for photography, film projectors were very commonly used to share the experience or history and make it communal. Typically, with digital photography of today, people huddle in front of the computer screen to view the results of recent shots. Taken further, the digital photos are either printed out or emailed. However, the communal experience analogous to viewing film slides on a projector is missing. Now, substitute the living room laptop or NAS stored and organized digital photographs and substitute the living room TV/HDTV as the film projector, and you’ve transcended the 20th century film viewing experience.
Digital photos, comprised of images from digital cameras, as well as film slides scanned to a digital format can be very easily organized and manipulated. The digital photos can be zoomed, sharpened, softened, red eye reduced, rotated, set to music, and automatically presented in ordered or random sequences. The living room laptop is the vital link to bringing those photos to the living room TV. Imagine a 50” HDTV displaying these photos, either to set a mood or as the main attraction to view with guests over popcorn.
In a slightly different use, the living room laptop can also act as the capture and storage device for a digital camera’s contents. Either through USB connection or by physically moving the media from the digital camera to the PC, the digital photographs are transferred to the living room laptop’s storage or indirectly to the NAS. The advantage is more human factors and convenience related than technological. That is, newly taken digital pictures can be quickly assimilated into the home storage or offloaded from the digital camera at the point of communal enjoyment, without having to load to an another PC and either burn a CD or make prints.
This article has focused on multimedia and the value of harnessing the capabilities of even a 5 year old computer for an enhanced living room experience. It shouldn’t be forgotten that non multimedia benefits have always been there. There is also a supplemental benefit, such as when television shows reference websites for additional information regarding products, people, statistics, or program tie ins. Given a large enough living room TV, using the PiP (picture in picture) function would allow watching the main TV program, while simultaneously viewing this supplemental internet delivered content. Additionally, consider instantaneous access to email, stock quotes, scores, traffic conditions, or even purchase movie tickets, all of which can be achieved in the living room.
Most of what has been discussed in this article is being integrated into set top boxes, HDTVs, game consoles, new multimedia convergence devices, cell phones and even DVD players. But until the best solution is ironed out, why not achieve this at no cost. What do you have to lose but that old PC.
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