HTPCs: A Victim of Evolution?
Once a "novelty", these specialty PC's will be the wave of the future.
The Evolving HTPC
Home Theater PCs (HTPCs) were poised to be the next must-have toy for technophiles. The idea was to have a single component to store and play your entire digital library of music, movies, and photos. The concept was nothing new. For several years, computers have been edging out TVs, stereos, and DVD players as the entertainment appliance of choice for college students confined to cramped dorm rooms. But the plummeting cost of high capacity hard drives and TV tuner cards, along with the ever-shrinking form factor size, led many average consumers to consider moving their PC from their desk to the den or living room.
Those consumers who made the leap soon realized that the reality didn’t quite live up to the fantasy. Users with vast MP3 collections, for example, quickly noticed that compressed music doesn’t sound so hot coming through full-size speakers. Getting it to sound right would mean countless hours of re-ripping CD’s (assuming they owned them in the first place) to their hard drive using a lossless audio codec (such as FLAC or Apple Lossless), which in turn made for significantly larger file sizes. An album’s worth of material now took up 500MB instead of 50MB.
DVD content, on the other hand, could be compressed down to about 1GB/hour of material using a codec like DIVX and would still look fine on most televisions. The prospect of having a video jukebox similar to what music lovers had been enjoying for years was very enticing.
Enter: High Definition Television (HDTV). Consumers who sprang for the big-screen experience encountered their own version of the MP3 phenomenon. Plagued with fuzzy image quality, compression artifacts, and washed-out colors, the DVD media’s inherent limitations suddenly materialized when blown up on a 40-inch+ screen.
Read all about it here, courtesy of HardOCP.com
Eric
Once a "novelty", these specialty PC's will be the wave of the future.
The Evolving HTPC
Home Theater PCs (HTPCs) were poised to be the next must-have toy for technophiles. The idea was to have a single component to store and play your entire digital library of music, movies, and photos. The concept was nothing new. For several years, computers have been edging out TVs, stereos, and DVD players as the entertainment appliance of choice for college students confined to cramped dorm rooms. But the plummeting cost of high capacity hard drives and TV tuner cards, along with the ever-shrinking form factor size, led many average consumers to consider moving their PC from their desk to the den or living room.
Those consumers who made the leap soon realized that the reality didn’t quite live up to the fantasy. Users with vast MP3 collections, for example, quickly noticed that compressed music doesn’t sound so hot coming through full-size speakers. Getting it to sound right would mean countless hours of re-ripping CD’s (assuming they owned them in the first place) to their hard drive using a lossless audio codec (such as FLAC or Apple Lossless), which in turn made for significantly larger file sizes. An album’s worth of material now took up 500MB instead of 50MB.
DVD content, on the other hand, could be compressed down to about 1GB/hour of material using a codec like DIVX and would still look fine on most televisions. The prospect of having a video jukebox similar to what music lovers had been enjoying for years was very enticing.
Enter: High Definition Television (HDTV). Consumers who sprang for the big-screen experience encountered their own version of the MP3 phenomenon. Plagued with fuzzy image quality, compression artifacts, and washed-out colors, the DVD media’s inherent limitations suddenly materialized when blown up on a 40-inch+ screen.
Read all about it here, courtesy of HardOCP.com
Eric
posted by 3DCOOL.COM at
3:19 AM
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