Bridging the Ten Foot Gap

I love media. I've got hundreds of CDs, thousands of photos and lots of gigabytes worth of movies stored on my home PC. With so much content, I really wanted space where I could everything without taking up space on my PC. My solution was to get a network attached storage device. I recently bought a Buffalo LinkStation Live network attached storage (NAS) device. It's 750GB so it can fit all my music, movies and photos. And since it's attached to the network I can access it from my home network, or anywhere in the world via the Internet. Pretty cool, eh? ls-live-lg.jpg The one thing I'm missing, however, is the connection between the PC and TV. But since my LinkStation works as a media server, all I need is a compatible device. Media extenders act as the bridge between PCs and TVs. They connect to your TV set and let you watch movies from your PC. PC Magazine wrote up a round up of products that can do this, including the Apple TV, Netgear's extender, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. But the Xbox and PS3 aren't full media extenders--they're game systems that can do some movies and media center functions. And Apple TV has just been pretty much ignored by everyone, including Apple. Now, SanDisk has unveiled a new flash-memory-based device that can take content from your PC to the TV. But no matter how SanDisk makes it look pretty, it's still sneakernet--you have to physically walk the flash-memory device from the PC to the TV. buffalo-linktheater-media-player.jpgMedia extenders seem like the best solution for me, especially now that I've parked all my media on my NAS. The Buffalo LinkStation that I bought is compatible with DLNA certified media devices, like Buffalo's own LinkTheater Wireless A&G Network Media Player. I was also impressed by some media extenders that Linksys unveiled last month. DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) is still a pretty new concept that not may people have heard of. It's simply a way to share media between PCs, TVs and other consumer devices within a home network. I'm pretty excited about having tons of storage, and am getting ready to buy a media extender to really take advantage of all my media. As much I love my media, I want to have it everywhere I go, and on any device. But alas, we haven't gotten there yet.
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