About MediaMentalism

Noticed anything about the media you consume recently? Your videos, tunes or pictures? Where are they stored, where are they played, and where would you like to play them? Chances are, in completely different devices. You download your tunes onto your PC, play them on your MP3 player, but really, you want to play them on your HiFi or car stereo. Equally, your videos and pictures are doubtless on your PC, yet ideally you want to watch them on your HDTV.

“When I was a lad…!”

As an old man once said, “things used to be so much easier in the old days!” You had one medium for transferring tunes from your HiFi or radio to your car: the cassette tape! If you wanted to listen to your tunes on the go, you used your tape-based Walkman. Videos were things you rented or bought, and which could be played through your TV without any problem whatsoever.

Then along came digital media, with first MP3, then MPEG and a raft of other media conversion and compression technologies, all of which took your beloved analogue content and transformed it into digital media. Suddenly, the PC became the centre of the media universe. You download your content onto your PC, and then play it, well, somewhere else! No-one really thought about where.

And then, just when you’d figured out how to actually play your media, somebody else invented DRM and told you that even though you could physcially play your media on your new device, you weren’t actually allowed to, and a whole heap of new hurdles were thrown in front of your path to listening and viewing nirvana.

Digital media is a glorious and powerful thing, but by god do they make it hard for us to listen and view what we want where we want!

MediaMentalism is all about gadgets that make sharing media easier.

How media gadgets have changed

I first came upon this problem myself when slowly making the transition to digital media by replacing my existing old analogue gadgets. First went my (really) old car cassette player, replaced by a new car with a CD player in it. However, I used to commute 100 miles a day, and so listened a lot to the radio; not the radio at 6am, though, but the radio at 1am, when the shows were much more interesting. Yes, I taped the radio at night, and listened to it during the day. With no cassette player in my car, though, I couldn’t do that any more.

My car’s CD player could play MP3 files on CD-ROM though, so I looked into how to get a radio broadcast burned onto a CD. Could I replace my HiFi with a new one that would do this for me? Nope! I could, however, get an FM tuner for my PC, and then save and burn the broadcast as an MP3 file onto a blank CD. Although this worked, it kind of rendered the much better quality radio in my HiFi completely obsolete. Plus it meant leaving my PC on overnight, which was costing me a fortune!

The curse of the download

Things only got worse when I started downloading content. MP3 files are great for transferring to MP3 players, but again, what about my HiFi? Its speakers are much better than my PCs, yet more and more of my tunes are now living on my PC. Worse, the PC is upstairs, while the HiFi is downstairs. I needed something to get my PC and my HiFi talking to each other.

But what? Do I get a wireless HiFi that can stream my music from my PC, or a dedicated media streamer that does the same thing but connects into my existing HiFi? If I go for the streamer, do I get a dedicated one, a combined router/firewall/streamer version, or one with or without its own storage…?

And what about TV? I want a PVR to replace my ageing video cassette player, but I also want to use the new PVR-like features of Windows Vista. Great, except my PC won’t talk to my TV, and I can’t use a TV card in my PC, as I have cable, with no terrestrial reception whatesoever. And that’s before I’ve figured out how to get my downloaded videos off my PC and playing on my TV! Grrrr!

The tyranny of choice

The choice, in other words, has become bewlidering. It’s set to get worse, too, as mobile phones join the fray, threatening to become dedicated streaming media devices in their own right, while new technologies such as Universal Plug n Play (UPnP) and the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) allegedly try and make all our gadgets talk to one another seamlessly - but I’ll believe that when I see it!

So MediaMentalism is born from this confusion, and sets out to resolve it. The site is written by me, Mike Evans, to showcase the latest gadgets that do one thing: set the media free by enabling content stored on one gadget to be played on a completely different gadget.

MediaMentalism will provide HowTo articles on getting the most from your media setup, and will look forward to the future of a wirefree integrated home entertainment system, with different gadgets from different manufacturers all seamlessly communicating with one another.

As dubious a goal as that sounds now, it’s one that a ton of companies are working towards, and that will happen over the next few years. MediaMentalism will be there to report on the media innovations as they happen (and sometimes before!), and showcase the next generation of gadgets that really will set media free.