Not yet ready to ditch your traditional home theater setup but still want the convenience of digital playback on your TV? Or maybe you intend to have multiple mediaserver boxes around the house and require some way to control and access your content from one place. In this case, an ideal solution is to invest in a media server. Don't let the word 'server' scare you though. You won't need a temperature-controlled room with a team of administrators on 24-hour shift. A media server is but a PC converted to act as a dedicated central storage library to backup and organize all your audio, video and image files.
Of course, all these goodies just sitting in storage isn't going to do you any good. What you want is to be able to retrieve this content from other PCs in your home or stream music and video to your Hi-Fi and TV. While it wouldn't be a problem achieving this by creating a LAN with other PCs and mediaservers, you can't really plug a network card into your home theater equipment. That's where a good media extender comes into play and we've got that end covered as well.
We've also built our media server on the premise that it would also be used as a media processor. No point having all that processing power and letting it sit idle. Safeguard your DVD collection for storage or edit that family vacation footage into a video montage, our media server is powerful enough for everyday encoding needs.
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Linksys WMCE54AG Wireless Media Extender
SRP: US$250
Networking is taken care of by the motherboard as well. With two full-speed Gigabit Ethernet controllers plus ASUS' WiFi-g module that is compliant with standard IEEE 802.11g 54Mbps wireless networks, setting up that home LAN or WLAN is made so much easier. The WiFi-g module can be configured as a regular wireless adapter or made into an access point.
In order to provide media streaming to any room in your home. You're going to need a media extender. The Linksys WMCE54AG may be one of the first products to market, but it is intuitive to use and feature packed. Not only can you stream recorded media from your server, but it can be configured for live TV and works well with Microsoft's Windows XP MCE 2005.
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