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.