I was in a computer shop yesterday buying more RAM for the new laptop. Once I had stuffed 1GB into it, the bloody thing actually started to work like it should. I curse all computers companies that sell you a computer loaded with Vista, and fail to install 1GB or more of memory as standard. I have 2GB on the PC, and that I think is the bare minimum for a machine that gets a half decent work out.
I digress. The shop also sold the new media workstations thingys. I have never seen one up close and personal before. The one on display looked pretty fancy - at first, I mistook it for an old fashioned overhead projector. Once I got past that, I grabbed a brochure and perused the price list.
A basic unit starts at $2600, and the quickly go up to over $3500 as you add more features. Forget it - I don't need an "entertainment hub" that much. I am still fit and active enough to get off the couch, get a DVD out of the cabinet and load it into the DVD player. Yes, it would be nice to have 1TB of storage with hundreds of hours of stuff on it, but what sort of stuff am I going to put on it? Movies? Watch most of them once, and never want to see them again. Maybe once more in 10 years time. Why clog up your hard drive with something that gets viewed that often?
Music? All the music that we have takes up around 5GB, and it would take more than a week of continuous listening to get through it all. Given how we listen to music, and how much we like the radio, it will take a year to get through the whole thing.
Home movies and photos? The thousands of digital photos that I have taken still easily fit onto a single DVD. It will take another 2 years of frantic snapping before I fill a single DVD. Home movies are different - they are fat as hell and take up a lot of space, but most of the footage that I have taken is garbage. One thing I learnt from Top Gear is that they have a 100 to 1 ratio of footage shot to shown. They have to shoot 100 hours of video to make a good one hour program. I reckon my ratio is about the same. I try to not shoot anything longer than 30 seconds, as most people get bored of a home movie after about 20 seconds. By the time I edit out the crap, I usually have a 20 second clip. That's all we need. We don't need two hours of footage of junior waving a chop bone around at dinner in a barbaric fashion - 10 seconds is more than enough thank you very much.
I rigged up our own entertainment hub today for $8.95, which is what a cable cost me at a hi-fi shop. I can now plug the laptop into the amp, and the laptop can read the music libraries on our other PC's, so we can play all our music in the loungeroom on good quality speakers via the laptop. If I fart around a bit more, I will probably work out how to do the same with movies, but why play a movie of a PC in another room? Why not just get it on DVD and put the DVD into the DVD player and watch it like a normal human? I have seen downloaded movies played via PC's on enormous plasma screens, and they look shocking. The quality reminds me of when I dropped my old film camera in a stream and later had the film developed. It was half ruined. That's what ripping and compressing does to perfectly good movies. Given that I can rent a DVD from my supermarket for $3, why would I stuff around with downloading a crappy copy of it?
Of course I never get around to renting any as I don't have time to watch anything - blogging has filled the space that movies used to occupy.
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