In recent years the humble PC has gone from being something that was used to power businesses to being a multimedia hub in the home. Technology experts used to warn that computers would give way to less unwieldy devices over time; but these days the PC is increasingly seen as the heart of a good home entertainment system. In fact, the PC is arguably the ideal device to use to access music, video, film or photos as Walker Rainey, an underwriter living in Dublin, found out when he set up a top-of-the-range multimedia entertainment system in his new house.
By his own admission, Walker is somewhat obsessive about music and his collection of over 2,000 CDs would seem to offer proof of that obsession. Not surprisingly then, when it came to setting up a new home entertainment system he decided that he wanted to be able to access his sounds wherever he was in the house. With a wife and two children who were as equally obsessive as he was about music, a system was going to be required which would allow the whole household to tune in from a number of different rooms.
‘We’ve been collecting music on CD since it first become available in 1984 and during that time we’ve assembled a huge collection which we still keep adding too,’ says Rainey. ‘The children have also followed in our footsteps and are helping build up the stockpile.’
In addition to being able to listen to tunes around the house the family also wanted to be able to watch movies and television and listen to Internet radio from various different places and to even take advantage of online gaming.
MediaCentric on hand
Luckily for the Rainey clan there was a solution to hand thanks to MediaCentric, a Dublin-based firm which specialises in installing computer-based home entertainment systems that allow users to access all their media through a single remote control. MediaCentric has designed a system specifically to meet the needs of the Raineys. At the heart of the system is a HP server located in the basement which runs Microsoft’s Media Centre 2004 operating system, allowing all media to be accessed through a simple interface. The server has been connected to a SMC wireless router in the hallway with a second router fitted on the first floor landing so that various family members can access the server wherever they want in order to listen to music, watch movies etc.
The installation
The main media room has been fitted with a 50 inch pioneer Plasma, B&W speakers and a top of the range digital amp built into a custom wood cabinet. There’s also a traditional Hi-Fi system, standalone DVD player, NTL digital box and Sky+, all of which is controlled via a remote control which works with the Media Centre software to look after media output in the room, whether that be music, movies or photos slides. The server controls an NTL digital TV box which records TV directly onto the server. Recorded TV is then wirelessly streamed to a number of PCs and notebooks scattered around the house for easy viewing. Walker has a Sony PC set up in his study and there are two HP Centrino laptops for the kids, all of which link in to the main server.
In addition, for multi-room audio, six HomePod devices have been installed which allow everyone to access music from the main system from various access points.
In terms of music, Walker has converted his whole CD collection to MP3 and now has in the region of 30,000 tracks stored on his media server PC Given the size of the music collection, two external 300Gbyte Maxtor hard drives were fitted in addition to the existing hard drive for future storage and backup purposes.
A major challenge of the project was managing the music library. Artists names had to be standardised, music genres had to be updated and a convenient process had to be setup where playlists would not only be shared between the Media Centre server and the HomePods but also to the four iPods that family members have. ‘We mapped out 30 genres as a family,’ says Walker. ‘It was quite difficult to do because as you can imagine some artists fit into more than one genre but eventually we were able to narrow it down enough to work.’
Music on demand
As with all audiophiles, Walker is of the mind that there’s never enough songs to own so MediaCentric decided to install the Rhapsody music streaming service from Real which gives the family access to 750,000 tracks per month for a flat fee. Walker would be the first to admit that setting up his home entertainment system was far from easy. In fact, he found that there were many problems to unravel in establishing a system that would best suit his family’s particular needs.
However, he’s more than happy with the set-up he has now and has big plans to improve on it in the future including setting up web cameras for security purposes. ‘You can’t just buy a system like this off-the-shelf despite what some manufacturers are claiming,’ says Walker. ‘There’s just too much to it to do that. In order to have a system like this, you need to have a lot of patience and more importantly, you also need a high level of support in case things don’t work in the way that they should.’
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