Build the ultimate home media network

Today, PCs are increasingly found at the heart of our home entertainment systems – and for good reason too.

Compared with most consumer appliances, which are designed for specific tasks, PCs boast unrivalled flexibility, and can manage and deliver your photo, music and video collections, and record your favourite TV shows, and distribute them all throughout your home with the help of affordable networking equipment.

It’s a powerful and compelling concept, and one we’ve been talking about for some time. What’s changed over the years is that homes are becoming more like small company operations, with networks, multiple client devices, media servers, and all their associated administration.

If you’re thinking of building a complete networked entertainment system at home, or perhaps expanding an existing setup, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by planning and anticipating problems before they occur, to ensure your systems run smoothly. An entertainment system should be just that, keeping you and your family entertained, with as little time as possible spent tweaking or fixing problems.

Over the following pages we’ll explain everything you need to know about setting up and running a successful PC-based home entertainment system. We’ve divided the article into three main sections to help you plan, build and maintain your system, with tips on choosing the right hardware, avoiding incompatibilities and setting everything up so it runs with the minimum effort and maximum return.

We’ll also look at the future of networked home entertainment, with Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows Home Server; talk to the UK Patent Office about the legal issues of ripping CDs and DVDs; and interview two PCW readers who have built PC-based entertainment systems at home and won’t ever look back.

PLANNING
Before starting to construct a home media system, it’s crucial to think very carefully about what you’d like it to do, both now and in the future. This includes considering storage, and evaluating different media encoding formats and the kind of devices you’d like to play them. Many parts of the system will be inexorably linked, so it’s important to think about how the complete system should work, right from the start.

Client and server
The most flexible, powerful and scalable approach involves storing all your media on one machine and accessing it with others around your home. So the first aspect to consider is exactly what kind of hardware and software you will use to store your media, and what kind of devices will access and play it.

In most cases the storage device will be a PC-based server, but if it’s just used for storing files, a simpler network-attached storage (Nas) appliance could be sufficient.

The media playback device could be a PC, a networked games console, a dedicated media appliance or any combination of the three. There are many options, but one thing to note is that most media appliances require specific software to be installed on the device that’s serving the media files. If this software is only available for Windows, for instance, it rules out Nas devices for storage, unless they’re working in conjunction with another Windows machine.

Additionally, beware of mixing and matching different appliances as each may require its own software to be installed and they could conflict; it may seem boring, but you’ll inevitably find it easiest if all your ‘client’ devices are identical.