Smart Home Blog

Norwegian company Mesiro offers a compact and stylish Home Entertainment PC Merium. It mixes Scandinavian design and power of moder PC. Compact sizes 26x9x23 cm covers Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 (1.66GHz), 2GB DDR2 667 MHz, 250GB SATA HDD, Dual Layer DVD & CD Recorder, integrated Intel 950 graphic, 7.1 channel audio, Integrated Realtek Gigabit PCI LAN Chip and Intel WLAN-PCI – 802.11 a/b/g 54MB. For consumers available following outputs: DVI-I, HDMI & VGA via Converter, S-Video, S/PDIF, 6 x USB 2.0. As operation system Mesiro chose Vista Home Premium (which includes Media Center software). To control Merium media center the wireless multimedia keyboard and MCE remote control can be used.

The stylish Home Entertainment PC Merium is available for about $1000. It isn’t cheap but probably it’s defensible. For all fans of art Mesiro offers original covers. You can get high quality silk-print on polycarbonate by famous designers just for additional €69.

HotHardware published shots of Asus’ upcoming Eee Desktop. They look amazing! If Asus adds TV out and 5.1 audio Eee Desktop can be used as a media client for IP-based multi-room audio/video system (LinuxMCE, for example). It seems that Eee so compact and thin that can be mounted behind TV. Let’s see what specification will have Eee desktop and what price.

Moneual showed on CEDIA its tubular I*magine HTPC. It looks very impressive and features 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 processor, a 256MB ATI 2400 PRO GPU, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 750GB SATA drive, an integrated microphone for voice recognition and a top-loading combo drive to boot. Additionally, it includes a multicard reader, Bluetooth 2.0, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, HDMI, optical / 5.1 analog audio outputs, three USB 2.0 ports, a line-in jack, and a speaker on each end. Taking into account previous models of Moneual HTPCs I can imagine that the new tubular I*magine also uses MS Windows.

As usual there are no any information on the producer’s site about availability or price. Actually, I didn’t find anything about tubular I*magine HTPC there.

[via Engadget HD]

Sony launched VAIO TP1. That Living Room PC is stylish and features 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo chip, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 300GB 7,200RPM SATA hard drive, dual-layer DVD writer, ATSC / NTSC TV tuner, GMA 950 integrated graphics set, and HDMI / DVI / VGA outputs, a 4-pin FireWire connector, audio in / out, four USB 2.0 ports, Memory Stick / SD slots, 802.11b/g. You can own all of this together with Vista Home Premium for $1599.99. IMHO I’d exclude Vista and would try Linux with MythTV 🙂

[via Engadget]

Shuttle Inc. announced its new product – Shuttle XPC Barebone SG33G5M. It’s a small form factor PC with stylish design and impressive functionality. The SG33G5M supports processors of Intel’s Coreâ„¢ 2 Quad, Coreâ„¢ 2 Duo E6000/E4000 series, Pentium Dual-Core E2000 series and Celeron 400 series and can accomodate up to 4GB of DDR2-800 memory in dual-channel mode. It can play HD video (thanks to GMA 3100 onboard graphics engine and HDMI output) and allows playback of copy protected HD content through HDCP. The sound should be hight quality with built-in 7.1 HD audio chip with Dolby Digital Live! and DTS Connect certification. The integrated Gigabit-LAN connector is well-suited for data streaming in the local network or fast downloads from the internet. The remote control for Windows Vista Home Premium/Ultimate and the integrated VFD display complete the HTPC view.

The Shuttle Barebone originally produced for Windows but you can install Linux based media center as well (MythTV for example). The remote control sensor is compatible with lirc_mceusb2 and the Linux driver for VFD display is also available. You might be interesting to see the Python script to communicate with VFD display because MythTV doesn’t support it directly.

The Shuttle XPC Barebone SG33G5M will be available shortly with recommended retail price is €328.00.

Personally, I prefer Mac Mini form factor or something similar to Silverstone LC16M. The Shuttle looks a bit heavy for me. But its VFD display is really cool! I like it.

[via eHomeUpgrade]