Technology Offers Possibilities for Simplifying Home Entertainment Systems

If you're tired of having lots of pieces of home entertainment equipment littering your living room you're not alone. This over abundance of home entertainment electronics, or "Set Top Fatigue" as it's called by some industry analysts, is the frustration that's caused by having an enormous number of individual pieces of electronics in one's living room. For example, you have a DVD player to watch movies from your personal library or that you've rented, you have a video gaming platform, probably still have an old fashioned VCR, you have a digital receiver from your satellite or cable TV company, and you obviously have the TV itself. There's also a good chance that you have another set top box that can bring media from your computer or directly from the Internet such as a SlingBox, an Apple TV, or a Vudu. All of these devices take up a lot of space, litter your coffee table with remote controls, and create a tangle of cables that you pretty much need an electronics engineer to decipher.

There are some solutions to this problem though that don't involve becoming a Luddite. The key is to eliminate individual devices without eliminating their functions in your home entertainment system. In other words, do away with redundancy. First of all, you can probably get rid of your VCR. Most movie titles are being published on DVD these days and with Digital Video Recorders widely available, you won't need a VCR to record TV shows. Plus, with the ability that many home computers have to burn video onto DVD's that can be played in any DVD player, you won't need a VCR for home movies either.

The second piece of equipment that you should eliminate is the DVD player. While this advice may seem to be too much after having gotten rid of the VCR because the DVD player replaces many of its functions, a stand alone DVD player is also really redundant. That's because many other devices are capable of playing DVD's. For example, the Sony Play Station 2 and the Sony Play Station 3 can both serve as DVD players in addition to serving as gaming platforms. In fact, the Play Station 3 can even play Blu-ray discs in high def resolutions of up to 1080p. The Microsoft Xbox 360 can do the same with standard DVD's and HD-DVD's. In fact the only modern video gaming system that can't replace a DVD player is the Nintendo Wii. Also, if you want to upconvert standard DVD's to near high def resolutions, you don't need a special DVD player to do it. The Sony Play Station 3 can do that as well.

The ultimate solution- one that will eliminate the need for a DVD player, a video gaming system, a receiver, a DVR, and a box to download media from the Internet- is a media center computer. These devices combine the functions of many other set top boxes into a single unit, and while significantly more expensive than normal computers, may actually cost less than the some total of all the devices that they replace. At the very least, media center computers will make the cabling simpler and sharply decrease the number of remote controls that you have to keep track of. Plus, you'll be able to surf the Internet, email, and get work done from the comfort of your living room.

All that it takes to simplify your home entertainment system is to get devices that perform several different functions instead of just one or two.