Home automation has always been one of the most sought after pieces to anyone’s home or home theater environment—at least to our fans. Getting ready to watch a movie, you press a button and the lights dim, the curtains go down, and your movie collection shows up. In the past this was impossible to suggest without an exorbitant price tag, […]
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For home theater PC (HTPC) the value of a good wireless keyboard should go without saying. After all, despite its special role in the A/V stack a HTPC is still a PC – so text entry and pointer based navigation is an essential aspect of configuration, use, and maintenance. Also as over the top (OTT) content’s search based consumption takes […]
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A small home theater PC (HTPC) driven by an Intel Atom is not a new idea. Both NVIDIA’s ION and Broadcom’s Crystal HD offered solutions that coupled the chip’s TDP with specialized hardware that overcame its shortcomings–one with a complete GPU, the other providing just hardware accelerated video decoding. Neither of these products truly delivered on the concept of a […]
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Even in a mid-sized home, it is quite common to end up with a few “dead spots” where the main Wi-Fi router just does not provide enough signal to make the network work smoothly. Until recently–if your network is based on 802.11AC–the only way to address this, and take advantage of AC’s performance was by adding another full-on router acting […]
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Last year CyberLink added the option to subscribe to PowerDVD alongside their cloud service, and that continues to be available this year with PowerDVD 14. The $44.99 per year (or $14.99 per quarter) alongside the standard purchase options of Ultra ($99.95), Pro ($79.95) and Standard ($49.95). If you opt for the subscription or Ultra 10GB of CyberLink Cloud storage is […]
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NAS (Network Attached Storage) units have been growing in popularity over the years, due to their ease of use in providing a lot of storage in a compact enclosure, while making redundancy a simple matter of replacing drives when warned. With the HTPC continuing to evolve however, where does the NAS stand in supporting or replacing your traditional server box […]
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For home theater PC (HTPC) “small” is another word for “compromise”. Thankfully, the amount required by our miniscule content consumption devices has decreased exponentially over the last few years. There is still a price demanded however, tiny systems require slower mobile integrated processor graphics (IPG) to drive them. We have to choose between size and performance; it is simply not […]
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When Intel brought out their Haswell Next Unit of Computing (NUC), inclusion of features like SATA made it clear that they had bigger things in store for the little system. They were honest that some of this promise will require 3rd party case OEMs to fully realize, but Intel quickly announced that they would be creating their own chassis with […]
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Nothing can deliver the raw capability of Gigabit Ethernet when it comes to pushing large amounts of data around the home. Unfortunately, in many homes it just is not practical to pull Cat-6 through the walls, so other methods must be found to enable the demands of a fully functional media consumption network. Where many other low-installation-effort home networking technologies […]
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Over the last few years Fractal Design has cultivated a reputation for delivering intelligent, quiet, and well-built PC cases that do not require breaking the bank. With solid steel construction, ample storage options, and three hydraulic bearing Silent Series R2 fans (2x 120mm, 1x 140mm) included, we should expect the ARC MINI R2 Micro-ATX case to continue this tradition. However […]
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