I too used to think that a full screen TV based music browser was The Way Forward (tm), but having tried it, I was wrong. In fact - I know several people who went the HTPC route and they've all gone back to much simpler solutions, most involving Squeezeboxes. Some obvious issues:
* Navigating most GUIs using a remote control is an exercise in frustration. Even when well designed, there's a tradeoff between simplicity and feature-richness. When you have a huge display the temptation is to throw in bells and whistles (otherwise, why bother?) and that makes the UI overly complex. Think how annoying DVD disc menus are to select a scene. Now imagine that every time you wanted to play some music. * TVs make noise. It's not always significant but I can clearly hear any kind of CRT and my plasma has a cooling fan. * TVs use power, lots of it. I see people on here complaining about the 5W a SB3 uses, well that's nothing compared to a honking great flat panel. * Many TVs have a finite lifespan. It always felt dumb to me wasting the rated hours on my panel just so I could see the currently playing track in 3 inch high letters. * Unless you have a _very_ good programmable remote, then listening to music requires you to switch on the player, the amp, and the TV, and then switch them to the correct inputs and potentially adjust the aspect ratio. Even _with_ a very good remote (like my Harmony) that was a lot of steps and the more steps, the more likely that something would go wrong. * Complexity. KISS. 'nuff said. In short, it was just too much of a pain to listen to music, so I pretty much stopped doing so. Finally cracked, bought another SB, threw out the $2k HTPC and have never looked back. Oh, and forget about using wireless for streaming video to this thing. Look at how many problems people here have streaming just audio... -- radish ------------------------------------------------------------------------ radish's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=77 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=27325 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
