With the demise of ‘wombat’ our slimline PC that held our music in mp3 format we’ve been looking for a suitable replacement for some time..
I tracked down the Pinnacle Systems ‘Show Center’
The show center is basically a slimline pc with no harddisk and no fan that streams Audio, Video and Pictures from a central ‘Media Server’ onto your TV..
It will read MP3 and PCM format audio, and MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and Xvid AVI video, JPEG, BMP, PNG and GIF picture fomats. It also supports (with the latest firmware) Internet Radio, and it has a web browser in it!!
The ShowCenter box provides has all audio and video outputs you’d need, Scart, Component Video, Composite Video, S-Video, Stereo audio outputs (RCA,Optical and S/PDIF) (provides dolby 5.1 for videos encoded with it apparently as well!)
It also has a built in Network socket and a PCMCIA slot for a wireless card.
The ‘Media Server’ PC holds all your music, photos and movies and you can navigate and play them from the TV box via a remote control, multiple Media Servers can be connected into a single ShowCenter (read unlimited storage!!). The PC application on the media server PC handles all the streaming and playlists, and best of all the box is firmware flashable..
The bandwidth is pretty low although a wired network is really needed to view fullscreen video, and the GUI although still needing some work is useable..
We’ve currently got about 100 of my 2000+ albums encoded onto it at the moment streaming and shuffling them all.. isnt technology great… ?
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