Intel Developer Forum Day 3 - More from the Tech Showcase

Linksys Digital Media Adapter

With Windows XP Media Center Edition the consumer electronics/PC divide was bridged, but it also created a demand for even greater access to the media stored on a media center PC. With such a sleek OS and well implemented interface anyone who's used it has essentially been spoiled, and you'll find them wanting a media center PC in every room. Obviously having a media center PC in every room can be quite expensive, but what about using a media center PC as a content server to TVs spread all throughout your home? This is where the Digital Media Adapter comes into play and Linksys had one implementation on display at IDF.

The Linksys media navigator is a little box that can hook up to your TV through standard S-Video or coaxial cables, and features wired as well as wireless networking support.

Content is served to the Linksys navigator over one of these two networking standards (10/100 Ethernet or 802.11b), and is then fed to your home entertainment center.

Although in this case we're only able to serve music and pictures, the future of this technology will hopefully bring recorded video content to the end user as well.

The Linksys media navigator interface is fairly simple to navigate through and it is controlled via an infrared remote. The remote we used was unfortunately very directional, which is usually a flaw of poorly implemented IR interfaces. We were also disappointed with the speed at which we could navigate through the interface; there was a slight delay between hitting a button on the remote and having the interface actually respond, which can be frustrating.

With a better remote and a faster interface, we'd say there would be decent potential for the Linksys Media Navigator, which we'd expect to be available in the coming months.