HAHA just like Dr Frankenstein shouted when he created his monster, I feel like that this afternoon now that I have created what I am referring to as my “Media Beast.” For so long now I had been running a Western Digital WD TV setup at home. It was fantastic for the videos that I “acquired” and was a great way for me to watch them on my TV at home. Well thanks to the upgrades in the Systems I went from an original non HD version, to a HD Version before I left Australia. Now that I am over here in the USA, I am taking it one step further.
Media Beast Phase 1 is now complete and this is my Living Room TV. The Main Big Screen (Sony Bravia LCD 40″ HDTV) doesn’t have Cable TV hooked up. I decided against forking out almost $100 a month for it over here. Sure this means I am limited to only Free to Air but to be honest, I don’t watch all that much TV anyway (well TV at TV times that is). More often than not I miss the shows I want to watch and end up having to Stream or Download (legitimately of course) or whatever. So Free to Air is fine (King 5 News in the morning for me before work, way better than Sunrise back home).
Well connected to the TV now is a Cheap Blu Ray player (no discs yet though) but then it gets nice. I picked up a cheap Soundbar for the sound system (it works, its nothing all that special) and then it gets creative. I picked up the newest version of the WD TV, the Live version. It comes built in with WiFi so it can stream Hulu and Netflix directly to my TV. But that’s not all. Before I left I had picked up some Seagate GoFlex drives and when I got over here, put them all together with the GoFlex Net which is like a little docking station that turns the portable drives into a Network Attached Storage Server. Not only does it mean I can access my Files on these drives from work, it feeds directly to the TV now as well!
So right now, the small drive connected directly to the WD TV Live is currently syncing some data across, but really once this is done, I will probably just share across the network my “Unwatched” folder and that way once Phase 2 (Smaller but similar bedroom setup) is complete I will have a fully networked Media Beast where I can watch anything I want, anywhere I want in my apartment or even on my balcony thanks to WiFi, Technology and being a Geek on so many levels!