In 2001 Micrsoft announced that the Home PC was no longer just a device for playing games and writing letters. they introduced the Windows Media Center edition of XP and stated their aim that the PC should become the heart of entertainment in every home. It was a bold endeavor and one that has taken time to mature. At first the dream's fruition was held back by the lack of power in the PC, limited broadband connections and little media content. Now that has changed and at last the media-PC concept is taking off. Suddenly online TV services are the hottest new business plan for entrepreneurs.

So far the full media PC is still limited to a minority of geeks who know how to put the pieces together, but a larger wave of people are trying out video and music downloads or burning their digital photo collections to DVD. As the months unfold, expect to see media-PCs become more accessible and popular as online TV takes off and eventually replaces traditional media broadcasts. Microsoft have responded by including Windows Media center in all home editions of Vista. This is backed up with the built-in digital rights management (DRM) that is needed to give the media producers confidence to distribute their movies and music online. On the hardware side there are Viiv processors from Intel and AMD Live which provide support for media. These complement the DVD drives, graphics and sound cards and displays that can be put together to make a PC into a powerful entertainment center.

The big attraction of the media-PC is that it can combines the functionality of different media hardware into one unit. It can be a games console, a PVR, a music center, a satellite receiver a web interface, a DVD player and recorder and still play the role of a computer for sending e-mail, writing letters, managing photo storage etc. The cost is less than the combined total of the parts it replaces and it works as one whole, with a single remote control.

You can buy a Media PC from a traditional seller such as Dell, or you can look for a specialist producer who will offer a better looking unit for the libing room with a quieter cooling system. Another alternative is to build it yourself from the parts.

Monitor

The display can be a traditional PC monitor. LCD screens are now available in resolutions that beat any HDTV but they tend to be small. It is also possible to connect the PC to your flatscreen TV. Most graphic cards have at least two output channels so connecting up two screesn is easy. With Vista it is very easy to configure the screen resolutions. You can arrange that the screens are combined so that windows and the mouse pointer goes from one screen to another even if they have different resolutions.

Hardware components

Extra hardware components for a Media-PC can be boughts as PCI cards. There are special cards available for reception of signals from satellite broadcasts (DVB-S) and terrestrial (DVB-T) these can be installed in the PC and once the inout signal is connected, the programs can be viewed on the PC screen. If you have a motorised satellite dish you can get a card which supports DiSEqC to control its position.

The graphics card and sound card are obviously important components of the media-PC. You need one powerful enough for your needs although if you have a fast enough CPU you should not have problems with a reasonable graphics card. The thing to look out for is what connectors do the cards support. they need to be compatible with your monitor/TV.

High Definition Support

If you are specifically interested in HD content then your PC needs to be built to match. HD-DVD and Blu-ray optical drives are coming onto the market and their price will fall rapidly. The graphics card will need HDMI or DVI-D output connectors with HDCP copy protection support, otherwise the HD signal will be downgraded. It is possible to get adaptors between DVI-D and HDMI if you are limited for choice. If you want to pick up Hd satellite channels you will need a PCI card that supports the DVB-S2 standard.

Online-TV

Apart from the usual ways of obtaining media, the PC offers the possibility of internet fed content. Some material can be obtained directly as website downloads. For example YouTube has video content provide which has been uploaded by other web users, however the quality of both picture and content is very low. Another possibility is to use peer to peer Tv services such as bittorrent, Joost and Bablegum. Sky, BT and Virgin are now offering internet TV services combined with broadband connectivity. If you choose this option you do of course get an inteent phone service thrown in.