Now this is interesting. The developers of divx have released a beta of their new software which provides an easy way to play all your media files on all the computers you have. As regular readers know, I have been planning the construction of a ‘media box’ to hook up to my home theater system so that I can play my mp3 collection and the movies I grab using my tv capture card without having to hook my laptop up to the home theater. The basic idea is a sort of tivo/digital media box. Anyway I have been investigating my options. Lately I am leaning towards going with an Xbox because of the excellent xbox media player project, which I could have up and running for around $250 (as compared to the PC I specced out to do this, which would cost around $6-700). The downside is, no tivo functionality, the upside is, cheap! But Mastermind looks interesting also, I’m going to play around with it and see if it’s viable. the downside is it seems to rely on their centralized server, which I don’t like. I want to run the server on my own boxes, I have no interest in marketers building a usage profile on me.

More as I learn about this, over the next couple of months I will be installing something in the living room. What that something is remains to be seen 😉