The last few months I’ve been experimenting with the latest home electronics. First came Nintendo Wii (as a birthday present to kids), then followed Playstation 3 (for HD video), Handan’s HD digital TV tuner, new BenQ HD screen to replace HDCP-handicapped Dell, Behringer’s mixer for Genelecs etc.
The first big disappointment was PS3: noisy, fucks with scratchy CDs and many DVDs, incompatibility issues with the screen etc. On paper, Ps3 looks fine, but in practise the system fails miserably to become something like the centerpiece of my living room. Far from it! Yes, and I haven’t even thought of running games on it. I know that Nintendo rocks that sector 6-0 these days.
The second major disappointment was Handan’s HD tuner: major bugs (purple lines on the screen) and the HD picture (720p from Canal Plus HD) wasn’t that spectacular. That was gone today and I carried in a ProCaster personal video recorder with two tuners and a 300GB hard drive. Looks like another good investment and a necessary building block for a modern digital home experience. I’ve already scheduled Matti (the movie), Moore’s Columbine and Eppu Normaali’s 1986 live act for the next 24hrs! I have the option to suck them to my laptop after recording. This is almost radical. – Btw, what’s the difference to p2p save for this being legal and higher quality?
I’m still to crap the PS3 – what I need is a nice device to play DVDs. One option would be to try some kind of video streaming system like Apple TV. Audio has been streaming in my house from a laptop ever since Airport Express hit the selves three years ago.