I was a late adopter to DVD players. I knew that as soon as I bought one, a large portion of my income would be spent replacing my video collection. And sure enough, the paltry outlay on some generic NakaMakaTashi player has been dwarfed by the ever growing mountain of TV box sets.
And therein lies the problem. Getting up off the sofa, pulling disc 3 of series 5 out of the player; to replace it with disk 2 of series 1 - well frankly it's a bit of a chore.
Which led me to Colin, and the new and exciting world of multimedia. Colin, it has to be said is a bit of a geek. But what Colin doesn't know about IPTV is not worth knowing. So I told him of my problem - me, my ass, and the long walk to the DVD player.
Colin had a cunning plan. By simply rewiring the house with Cat6 Ethernet cable and installing a 2 terabyte server in the attic; my problems would be solved (well, the immediate problem solved, the £5k hole in my credit card would have to wait until another day).
"Anything which perhaps doesn't involve planning permission?" I enquired. He sighed. The timeless sigh of an artisan, thwarted by his patron's lack of ambition. He presented me with a shiny box.
Two days later, I now know more about manually configuring IP addresses than I really felt I ever needed to. I have 'flashed firmware' in the privacy of my own home; and I have the compelling desire to hunt down and kill the technical author who wrote 'switch on, sit back, and enjoy', in the manual. But, "It's alive! Alive!!!".
So now I sit, firmly rooted to the sofa, while my music collection (or the portion of it I've ripped so far) is magically beamed into my living room, from the hard drive upstairs. I can change CDs without getting off my ass - truly we live in an age of wonder!
Enjoying the same pleasure with DVDs will have to be a day two deliverable. We're looking at around 250 man-days to rip the files, and the aforementioned 2tb of hard disk. It may be more cost effective to acquire a Philippino houseboy.
