Htpc and Clutter Free Living Room

With so many options available in the market, it is easy to get lost in choosing a media player. A media player can be a home theater pc, a game console or other type of device which is designed to play different kinds of media. While game consoles like Xbox and PS3 have entered to many living room, you still might feel that you are missing something. While you are able to watch your movies with ease, it might be cumbersome to load your images from the camera to the console or it feels awkward trying to browse with the primitive built-in internet browser. It soon starts to feel that why not to put the computer to the living room.

You need to create a home network for your HTPC and other devices to talk to each other (both wired and wireless LAN). However, a simple wireless network might not be enough if you also want to watch your movies from your external network hard drive. You will soon realize that wireless network is not simply fast enough, so you still need to use the cable connection. To my experience, a gigabit ethernet router is much more suitable for your high-definition home videos compared to the traditional routers.

After connecting all the devices, you will find yourself in the middle of a cable mess and your living room suddenly does not look so attractive anymore. Particularly, if you have small children, you also can create a dangerous environment with all the cables and wires laying around. For this reason you should consider

In my digital living room cables are hidden inside cable organizer so that they are out of sight and children are not able to access the cables and plugs. A gigabit router is visible next to television, to maximize the wireless network range. You can alternatively hide the router, but it will also limit the wireless range. As I chose to leave the router visible, Apple Airport Extreme was my choice with its beatiful design and great wireless range.

Your music, photo and video collection can easily grow so large that your device’s hard drive is not enough. You also might want to share the files between different rooms or computers in your apartment or house. In addition, you need to remember to take backups of your precious media files, e.g. your holiday pictures. So, you need to look for a solution to store your files to external network hard drive.

Relating backups, you should not limit taking backups on one location only, but additional online backup service might be useful particularly for your photos. I use service called Mozy, which automatically backs my photos and videos to online location. This is important added security in case of fire or theft in your apartment.

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Tagged as: computers, gigabit router