Product: Neuston Virtuoso MC-500 Digital Media Centre Price: $1,980 Pros: Simple hardware setup and software installation Cons: Image quality over a high-resolution projection television is awful
With the growth of broadband internet connections, vast quantities of digital media content is regularly used and stored in many homes around the world. This has created demand for so-called digital media players, a flourishing new segment in the consumer electronics market.
These small appliances are used to manage and play the video, music and pictures stored in a home PC on a television set or more elaborate home entertainment system. They eliminate the hassle and cost involved in hooking up a multimedia PC to a television or in copying downloaded music and video to a disc before these can be enjoyed in the comfort of your living room.
Singapore-based start-up Neuston has promised a couch potato's dream come true with its Virtuoso MC-500 Digital Media Centre.
This product offers high-quality playback over a wireless or wired link, and supports the Macintosh, Windows and Linus operating systems.
Computer processing resources meant for other software applications are not compromised since all decoding - the electronic process of recovering compressed data stored in a PC and reconstructing that information on a television - is done by the Virtuoso MC-500.