High Resolution

Thanks for all the AV feedback. Despite Tumblr’s inability to receive or display comments correctly I managed to bounce ideas off people and get some good advice.

Ultimately, I determined I just can’t justify a full home theater rig. My setup is in kind of a weird in-between state relative to the way AV receivers are marketed: I am just certain that the speakers are better driven by my existing AVA amp than by the Front channel of a 7.1 70-100 watt per channel amp, but HT people have made unamplified pre-outs the domain of the high end, assuming you’d have separate power amps for each of your 7 (or 9!) surround channels. Aesthetically, this sort of wiring rats’ nest is just nuts, it’s not at all what my (or, I’d argue, anyone’s) living room needs:

I have zero interest in wiring my living room for more speakers so the feature set on the AV receivers that I’d actually use is reduced to (a) moving input switching from the TV to the receiver and (b) provide digital audio in for my not-yet-purchased AppleTV.

Which brings me to the real dilemma: the ultimate goal, as I said in yesterday’s post, is to get easy, headless access to the mp3 library. I had been looking at the aTV as a good way to get that, via AirPlay or the Remote iOS app, which would probably work, but the more I look into it the more limited and locked-down the aTV seems. It’s kind of sad really; the thing doesn’t even include a web browser?! The closest way to get there seems to be this beta version of aTV Flash Black but it’s ridiculous you have to jailbreak the device then install payware on it to bring up a web browser. I understand wanting to control the ecosystem and blah blah blah but this box is basically crippled for no good reason.

On the other end of the spectrum are the open media box projects like XBMC, Boxee and Plex. I’d messed with XBMC a while back and while at one level it’s amazing that it works at all, it’s not something I could hand off and expect to work without constant futzing around — for instance it manages media sources completely separately from iTunes so it won’t automatically pick up changes in the library. These would run on older appleTVs but not the new one anyway, so it’s sort of moot. Plex is definitely slick though, thanks to @dsully for pointing me at it.

So what I realized was that I want a real computer with some remote control ability, plugged into my TV, not a home theater PC at all. To that end:

This guy goes becomes my new desktop. The old Mini, which is already upgraded to 4G memory and a 1TB 7200RPM drive, goes into the living room, and will connect via DVI to the TV, via normal 3.5mm-to-RCA to the amp. Bluetooth KB and Trackpad and we’re golden for couch surfing.

Yes, I will still have to get off the couch to switch inputs. I think I can live with that.