any advice for a complete dimbo!

[admin_exported]

Hi,

I work for a chap who wants to upgrade his home cinema and sound system. The first step for me is to get him a new DVD player as his old one broke. He has Sky+ HD. He wants to connect his laptop to the TV. He wants to download and store movies and eventually transfer his CD collection on to the system.

I first suggested an extra Hard Drive, but on looking have thought that a DVD with a built in HDD might be the answer. However, I need to know if the DVD player/recorder could be connected to the laptop so that any thing downloaded on to the laptop can be stored on the HDD of the dvd player.

Does that make sense to anyone except me???

All help and advice gratefully received.

 

[d4v3pum4]

Firstly I wouldn't bother buying a DVD player. The price of bluray players has come down significantly enough not to ignore them. The Sony BDP-S350 costs £130 or so from amazon (last time I checked).

If he wants to download/store movies and music to his PC there are several options. Simply adding external hard drives (remembering to periodically back them up) is the most cost effective method. There are a number of new media servers out there at the moment e.g. Apple TV, WD TV Live, PS3 and so on. Visit sites such as ripcaster for the latest storage mediums too e.g. servers.

He can easily connect his laptop to the TV using the external monitor port which will either be VGA or DVI so check the laptop's specs to see which monitor output it has.

A good solution for music, is to wirelessly stream (assuming he has a wireless network) the music from his PC to the sound system (You didn't mention any makes or model numbers though) using a music streaming device. Cost effective but good quality solutions include the Squeezebox Classic and Apple Express. These connect to the sound system and link wirelessly to the PC and the internet to stream music stored on the PC and from internet services. I have a couple of Squeezeboxes and use them a lot, great bits of kit.

Using a DVD Recorder the way you mentioned wouldn't work and even if it did, they have limited hard drive capacity (160 Gb or so) so wouldn't really be suitable for storing downloadable content. Better to look at the methods mentioned above and then do some homework.

 

[Anonymous]

Many thanks for all that.

I did wonder about a separate external hard drive for the laptop and that's where I started from but the more you look the more confusing it gets.I'll look at the media hard drives.

We have a company coming to look at setting up a wireless sound system so maybe we'll use that route.

Thanks again