Week 6 Lecture part 2

I'm going to make a trend of using these second blogs as a medium for the deviations I have in the first blogs. More so to fully explore the concepts and ideas that I bring up that are somewhat related to the topic but are still a deviation from the original.

In this case, it's the idea of a media center or some sort of unified entertainment system.

Computers have always had a massive advantage over the old TV, this being the fact that Computers are built to be modular, versatile, constantly changing and improving. While in the case of a TV you buy the TV and that's it, it's a TV, you watch stuff on it. You can upgrade it to be bigger or have a clearer screen with some extras but its usually the case of forking out a couple grand for it. Not to mention to gain the full use of the TV you have to purchase other appliances such as DVD or Blu Ray player. You have to do this with computers aswell but DVD drives are generally much cheaper and smaller than a full fledged dvd player.

Believe it or not this is a computer. A media center computer to be exact. Works just like a regular PC except its meant to be in the lounge room and act as a replacement for all the extra appliances you usually have to buy to make up a home theater. So your Amp, CD player, DVD player all into one. Plus the extra versatility to play any kind of format you can find on the internet or anywhere else.

A regular PC can be 'upgraded' to become something more than a simple work station aswell, with the rights tool, some time and a lot of cash you can turn your humble PC into a fully fledged entertainment system. But I don't think people are as comfortable sitting in an office chair surrounded by screens with 7.1 audio blasting into their face as they are in the comfort of the lounge room.


These photos are not mine but I'm ridiculously envious of whoever owns these setups, mostly because of those massive screens.

It's always been an inevitable thing. One of the things I found very odd was how far behind the TV industry was when it came to the quality and features of their products compared to computers. When the modern computer came about a 320x240 resolution was impressive but now a days its over two thousand by god knows what. While 3 years ago most tv's humbly sat at a 800x600 resolution, some even less than that. Yet only in the recent years have they bothered to catch up with computers with the addition of Digital and HD services. While the lack of TV Broadcasts having these resolutions is quite obvious(lack of technology at the time) it never really made sense to be releasing DVD players that play a video at a far larger resolution than the TV themselves can output. Whatever. It's in this case where the PC will eventually take the place of the TV in the lounge room as the versatility of the PC is slowly becoming a necessity in today's digital world.