Serve it Up – Audio and Video Servers Galore

Maybe you've got a huge collection of digital music, and you'd really love to listen to it throughout your home, instead of simply on your iPod.

Perhaps you want to rip your DVD collection to disc and secret the cases away in storage.

No matter the particulars, chances are you have digital media you want to enjoy in the more comfortable parts of your home—away from the desktop. Enter media servers.

A few years ago it was a pipedream—the entertainment equivalent of the flying car: always on the horizon, but never in a form that you'd feel safe letting your mother use.

These days, though, there are an embarrassing number of ways to zip your digital media from one end of the house to the other. The task is in finding the right solution for you—and for your media.

IN MICROSOFT WE TRUST

Since most of the digital media that the vast majority of us enjoy originates with, resides on, or in some way interacts with a computer at some point or another, it makes sense that so-called Media Center PCs—computers that function as a disc player, cable box, DVR, internet radio client, online portal, and yes, network media server all wrapped up in one—continue to work their way into living rooms with increased acceptance.

This is especially true since the advent of Windows Vista, which may be reviled by hardcore desktop users, but is a blessing to media junkies who want their digital audio and video served up in style.

Of course, not just any old bargain basement discount PC from the local brick-and-mortar retail outlet will do for Home Entertainment readers. Thankfully, a handful of manufacturers—among them longtime HE favorites Niveus Media, Okoro Media Systems, and Inteset—have perfected the art of building luxury machines for the custom-installation market, with styling and features that extend way beyond the typical out-of-the-box Windows Media Center experience.

Which one is right for you? Again, it depends upon your needs and level of expertise.

Okoro Media Systems offers perhaps the most PC-like Media Centers of the bunch. They still build rock-solid devices built to deliver a unified and uncompromised audiovisual experience, but they offer the sort of flexibility you might expect from a more traditional online PC outlet: your choice of video cards and hard drives and TV tuners and network cards—even alternatives to Windows, if that's what you're looking for.

Inteset, on the other hand, caters to the customer who values security over choice, stability over tweakability. Their Media Center PCs are distributed via select custom installers, and even feature a Secure Lockdown feature that keeps meddling hands away from Windows features that aren't directly related to Media Center.

Niveus's focus, meanwhile, is on pure luxury. You'd be hard pressed to even identify their machines as anything remotely PC related. That, combined with whisper-quiet fan-free cooling and exclusive custom Niveus Software Labs plug-ins for Media Center puts the company's Denali and Ranier Edition Media Center PCs in a class of their own.

I LIKE TO MOVE IT, MOVE IT

Of course, you can use a Media Center PC to access just about any form of digital media housed on any other computer on your home network, setting up your own personal multimedia superhighway at home.

But not everyone wants—or has room for—a full-sized computer in the living room or media room, no matter how elegant it may be. To that end, there are any number of devices designed to access the music and movies stored on a centralized Media Center PC that is tucked away in an equipment room or home office.

One such solution, Microsoft's own Media Center Extender platform, replicates the user interface of Media Center, and offers streaming access to most of the formats supported by Media Center.

By far the most popular of these Extenders is the company's Xbox 360 game console, which features all of the niceties of standalone versions with two exceptions: it won't stream the popular DivX and Xvid video formats from within the Media Center Extender portion of the Xbox interface (although it will from the console's non-Media Center dashboard), and at its quietest its cooling fan still sounds like a swarm of angry bees hopped up on Red Bull.

Not to be outdone by its gaming competition, Sony's PlayStation 3 console also offers deft media streaming from PCs and Macs via DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) operability.

For those uninterested in digging into the details of industry-wide consortia and the peculiarities of home networking, DLNA is plug-and-play connectivity and support for a broad range of streaming media formats, including DviX and Xvid.

And while the PS3's Xross Media Bar might not have the pretty thumbnails and bright graphics of Media Center Extender, it offers quick, slick, intuitive access to the media files on any computer throughout your home, with but a few exceptions.

The biggest of those exceptions is, of course, the inability to play protected AAC files—in other words, any music you purchased from iTunes that isn't specifically labeled "iTunes Plus."

If your entertainment life is dominated by the lowercase i, though, there's hope for you: Apple TV offers network streaming of any content purchased or rented from the iTunes store, as well as many of the file formats supported by the iTunes software.

Like the Xbox 360 and PS3, Apple TV also has its own high-definition streaming movie rental service. Unfortunately, the player doesn't support the DviX or Xvid file formats without some crazy under-the-hood tinkering requiring lots of computer know-how.

So you can probably forget trying to play those downloaded BBC nature documentaries that you know will never air in the Colonies. (That is what the rest of you use BitTorrent for, right?)

TWEAKER'S PARADISE

If you're extremely computer savvy and prone to hacker-like tinkering, though, you're probably in the market for something more like Popcorn Hour's A-110 media server, a quiet, unassuming little box that supports every file format known to man and a few known only to three old hags who share an eye between them.

Its interface isn't exactly gorgeous, but if you're willing to go through the hassle of hooking it up, there's nearly nothing it can't do. It's one of the few media extender-type devices will full DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby Digital TrueHD playback.

It even supports ISO files—in other words, with the right software you can rip your DVDs in their entirety to a hard drive and the A-110 will play them without a hitch.

What's more, you can pop the hood and add your own internal hard drive and use the A-110 as a network attached storage device.

And to top it off, the A-110 features a fully functioning BitTorrent client, so you can download the latest episode of Britain from Above without even turning on your computer.

And that's just to start...