Velocity Micro’s Ultimate Media Center

By DT Staff Published December 4, 2006

Velocity Micro — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Hey! Stop spending all your money on Christmas presents and don’t buy that PS3 or Wii on eBay just yet. In a recent post on Velocity Micro’s blog, Chris Morley, Director of Product Development, outlines what he wants for Christmas:

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.

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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.

The ultimate media center? Check and double check! Expect this in your media room by January ’07 and with Velocity Micro’s reasonably priced systems don’t worry about returning too many gifts as pricing should be in line with a desktop with similar hardware.

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