11.28.2006
What I Want For Christmas
Posted by Chris Morley

I’m a home theater enthusiast. I love high resolutions, surround sound, and every shelf on my A/V rack filled with gadgets.

I want the ultimate media center. I want something with enough muscle to power multiple streams of high definition video – both in playback and recording - along with streaming to multiple TVs around the house. I also want to be able to easily burn copies of my favorite TV shows that I've recorded and encode videos for use on my PSP.

I want my entire media library of music, home videos, and photos to be accessible at a touch of a button, and I want it all protected on a high performance RAID 5 array that won’t erase my precious memories if a hard drive fails.

I want high definition media playback, Blu-ray or HD-DVD, and I don’t want it to hog my resources and skip frames while HDTV channels are being recorded in the background along with media streaming to various devices around the house. So I want a powerful 3D card with hardware VC1 and H.264 decoding support and a dual or quad core CPU.

And I want XHD gaming. I want to be able to play all my favorite games at 1080P with high dynamic range lighting and anti-aliasing. And I want it at a silky smooth 60+ frames per second.

And, most importantly, I want to give my cable box the boot. It’s clunky, inelegant, and it doesn’t match my high end equipment. So I want CableCARD support for my media center that allows me to decode my digital cable natively without the need for that clunky box.

Finally, I want all this hardware to be easy to use, so my family can get as much enjoyment out of it as I will. So I want Microsoft Vista Home Premium with its easy to use and intuitive interface. And when I get it out of the box, I want all the cables and documentation to be there so I’ll be able to use it right away.

I want the new (coming soon!) Velocity Micro media centers that are going to blow your mind.

[11.28.2006 @ 8:55 AM]  [Digg it]