Watch and learn

Posted on 16 Jan 2009 at 15:42

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There's more to digital entertainment than playing a CD while you work. Here's how to use your PC as a complete home media centre.

The homes of the rich and famous have long been adorned with multi-room AV systems featuring a central server operated by touch pads, screens and speakers around the house. With the rise of the media centre PC, the convenience of an automated all-in-one media system is a lot more accessible, but systems built for home entertainment can be more expensive and less versatile than other computers.

Fortunately, if you have an ordinary PC, you've already got most of what you need to enjoy music, movies and TV with total control, and the rest is easy and affordable to add. Forget about tangling with a rat's nest of TV cables whenever you want to record a programme, or rifling through CD racks for the track you fancy playing; it's time to bring your home entertainment up to date.

Sound investment

Your PC's sound card converts the digital data stream from a CD or DVD (or from audio files played in your web browser or other applications) into an analogue signal that you can hear. Unless your PC is very old indeed, it almost certainly has a sound card built in with stereo speaker connections, but it may not be ideal for a home media centre. For movies you really need surround sound, usually 5.1 or 7.1, which means there are five or seven speakers (front left, centre and right, one each side with 7.1, and rear left and right) plus a subwoofer to provide the bass.

If you only have a stereo sound card and a pair of speakers, it's not difficult to upgrade. The sound card is an internal component: if it's a separate PCI card you can remove and replace it, or if it's built into the PC's motherboard you can add a card in a spare PCI slot. If you don't fancy opening up your PC, you can also get USB sound cards that simply plug in. Surround speakers usually come as a set of five or seven satellite speakers that connect to a subwoofer unit, which contains the amplifier as well as the bass speaker.

It's worth paying a little bit more for satellite speakers that aren't too small and tinny, and if you already have a cheap set that came with your PC, you might get a very noticeable improvement by replacing them. The front left and right speakers are the most important for movies, and they're also the two that you'll use for listening to music, so these are the most important ones to get right. Once you have an amplifier in place, you can replace any or all of the speakers with standard models from a hi-fi shop such as Richer Sounds, though it's worth checking that the impedance is suitable for your setup. It's best to go to a shop that'll let you listen to the speakers before you buy, but reviews in audio magazines and websites are also a good guide.

Disc world

Watching a DVD on your PC is easy enough: most PCs sold in the past few years have the necessary drive and software. But DVD is being superseded by the new generation of HD (high definition) movies, distributed on Blu-ray discs and via the Internet. You can now add a Blu-ray drive for under £100 if you don't mind opening up your PC to install it; external drives are more expensive.It really isn't a difficult job to either swap your current optical drive for one that's Blu-ray compatible or to add one as a second drive.

A few Blu-ray drives offer playback only, with no disc burning capabilities, while drives that can burn Blu-ray discs still cost several hundred pounds. In between, today's typical drives will play but not burn Blu-ray discs and can burn the usual CD and DVD formats. Drives often come bundled with software for playing HD movies, but if not you'll need something like Cyberlink's PowerDVD 8. Your computer will also need to have enough processing power to handle the decoding. To find out whether your PC is up to the job, download and run Cyberlink's BD Advisor from www.cyberlink.com/stat/bd-support/enu/index.jsp.