Home theater, experience the entertainment of movie theaters right in your own living room.

The cinema is a good place to watch movies and relax. This is because you watch the movie in a wide screen with sound that can make you easily get lost in the movie scene. The picture and the sound is the most entertaining part of the cinema experience. However, if you can bring this technology home and with lesser expense, this is definitely something you will enjoy. This is the concept only a few American homes acquire in the past years. Lately late, however, a good number of American homes are starting to be less interested in going out of their abode to watch movies. This is due to the evolution of home theater system.

A simple home theater is easy to set up. All you need is a television set that measure bigger than 27 inches, a DVD player and three speakers. These are the basic components of a home theater. This may already give you the home entertainment you can enjoy with the almost theatrical experience. Why do I say almost, when I am sure you want the perfect feeling of a movie theater. This is because there are other equipments you might add to complete the home theater experience that will ensure a cinematic experience right in your own living room. As mentioned already, you may still enhance the three basic components by adding home entertainment furniture; however, everything is dependent on the budget you set for your home theater. The size of the room is another consideration of the complete package of your home theater.

A neat advice however by home theater experts is that you need to find a good size television set for you home theater set up. A good size does not mean the biggest you can find in the store. A good size television is dependent on the place in your house where you will set up the home theater. Big is not always good for you home entertainment system. It is a recommendation, however, that the television set should not be smaller than 27 inches. This is because the projection on a smaller television might be too inferior for your home theater.

Another recommendation is for you to find speakers that will give you the surround sound from high quality brand of speakers. In addition, you need to be sure that if you do not find the speaker that gives you enough surround sound, you need to be able to return it. There are speakers that sound good in the store but when you put it in a room, it may not sound well enough that will satisfy your requirement. If the store allows replacement, then that is a good deal. In addition, you may need to choose a good quality DVD player. It is however a belief by home theater experts that all DVD players deliver clear and crisp images, although there are those that promise a flicker-free picture, almost all DVD players provide this feature.

Knowing how big the room where you will set up your home theater will be the basis of how big the television needs to be. The size of the room is another consideration for the number of speakers. If the room is somewhat big, you may need more than the basic three speakers. Adding a subwoofer may also do good to achieve the best surround sound if your home theater is place on a huge room.

All these will give you the best home theater experience only a few in the earlier year’s experience. A home theater designer may be of big help in ensuring you will have the best home theater set up that will give you the best possible movie experience right in your own living room.

Google TV and the Battle for the Living Room

Can the internet kill broadcast television? And if it does, which companies will have the power to deliver the programmes we want, and turn our living rooms into their cash machines? It?s a battle that Google wants to win with Google TV, which goes on sale this month, but there are several established players including Apple, Microsoft and Sony. It?s also a market where many smaller firms compete, including Logitech, Roku and Boxee. In the UK YouView boxes based on Project Canvas are expected next year.

The way we watch TV is obviously changing. For decades, people were slaves to the schedules, with the major broadcast networks fighting for audience share. Today, people watch TV programmes from a mixture of sources. These include DVDs, streamed content from things like YouTube, iPlayer, Blinkbox, Netflix and Hulu, and pirate file downloads. You no longer have to watch programmes at the same time as everybody else. You can, in theory, have what amounts to your own personal TV station.

YouView is the UK establishment's answer to Google TV, Apple TV and all comers.
The growing number of ways to watch TV has naturally led to a growing number of boxes attached to TV sets. The process started with VCRs and DVD players, expanded through set-top boxes and media-savvy games consoles such as the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3, and then Microsoft Media Center PCs. Some people even have Acer Revo and Asus Eee Box PCs clipped to the back of their LCD TV sets, but not many. In the UK, viewers can also get TV delivered over the internet via services such as BT Vision (based on Microsoft?s Mediaroom technology) and TalkTalk TV (formerly Tiscali TV), and other countries have similar services.

Now companies want to sell users even more boxes -- Apple TV, Logitech?s Revue (a Google TV box) and D-Link?s Atom-powered Boxee Box, and so on.

As you?ve no doubt noticed, very few systems have had much success. The fact is that while many companies have the ambition to take over the living room, new devices more often look like a confusing addition to whatever mixture of DVD, PVR, Freeview, cable TV, Sky+ and possibly TiVo boxes people already have. There?s a struggle to find more physical space, and how many people still have spare HDMI ports?

At the moment, then, the most successful living-room media invaders are the games consoles, particularly the PS3 and Xbox 360. The PS3 found many a home as a cheapish Blu-ray player when standalone Blu-ray players were expensive, and in the US it offers access to Netflix and Hulu services. The Xbox 360 provided a way to stream media from the PC in the home office or study then expanded by delivering movies (again, with Netflix in the US) and providing access to Facebook, Twitter and video chat.

But both machines are limited by their appeal to hardcore gamers rather than a broad spectrum of family users, and long sessions with first-person shooters are less than ideal when everyone else wants to catch up with EastEnders. Microsoft Kinect and Sony?s Move might bring in a less committed Nintendo Wii-style audience, but I wouldn?t bank on it.

The new Apple TV (no HD support, no hard drive, very few codecs) looks doomed to continued failure because Apple?s business model is to charge for a very limited range of content that you can easily get outside its proprietary "walled garden". The fact that people will pay for the convenience of getting stuff on an iPhone or iPod doesn?t necessarily mean they?ll pay to watch it on their home TV.

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