AUDIO & VIDEO MYSTERIES

A few final thoughts about file formats for audio and video and how that affects a Vista Media Center Extender. This is the place where strong people are humbled and the whole project can be brought down with screams of frustration. I can only touch on a few of the...

THE MEDIA CENTER COMPUTER

Running a Vista Media Center Extender in the living room requires a computer in the house running Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate. Your home computer can send your photos and music to the living room without working very hard, so it’s quite possible to use...

HP MEDIASMART CONNECT

HP has been creating devices for years to bring Windows Media Center to the living room. There are two new Vista Media Center Extenders being marketed under the “MediaSmart” name that have some very interesting features. The HP MediaSmart Connect is...

MEDIA IN THE LIVING ROOM

Your photos are on your computer. Your music is on your computer. It makes sense that computers should be able to record TV shows – it’s kind of a computery thing to do, right? It’s probably occurred to you that it makes sense to store movies on a...

OLYMPIC TECHNOLOGY

By the close of the 2008 Olympic Games, NBC will have broadcast 2,900 hours of live coverage – more than the total number of US television hours for all previous summer Olympic Games combined. In addition to the broadcasts on the primary NBC channel, video...