A few days ago we were contacted by the guys at LinITX.com Apparently they had a little box we'd be interested in.  Turns out the ASRock 330 is another nettop PC, but one with a nice GPU.  What makes this especially interesting to us is that the XBMC team have recently added GPU support to the Linux version of their world beating media player software.  So can this little £250 machine replace our weapon of choice, the Mac mini which costs double the price?  Read on to find out...

Digital files affect almost every facet of our life these days.  We download MP3 files, subscribe to podcasts, shoot thousands upon thousands of digital photos, watch streaming TV and movies over the Internet and email documents back and forth.  All of this adds up to a lot of digital files, but for the most part they aren’t being utilized to their fullest potential, nor being stored in a secure location.  Furthermore, one person in the home can often only access them at any given time.  With a little help, you can easily automate the back up, storage and centralization of all your digital files and enjoy them in ways never before thought of...

After our piece on virtual home servers, here's another alternative to saving power, money and the planet whilst still serving your media around the house.  The Tranquil BBS2 Barebones Home Media Server is a low power, 5 SATA bay, barebones box. Just choose your OS and apply...

Jon Bentley from Channel 5's Gadget Show has taken the Philips Streamium MCI500H for a test drive.   The system can hold around 8,000 tracks on its own built in 160GB hard drive as well as streaming from other media sources around your home like PCs. 

it features both wired Ethernet and WiFi, FM and Internet Radio and a top mounted USB socket for playing from a thumb drive.  The £500 system supports DRM free MP3 files, AAC and WMAs (of the non-lossless variety). Check out the video afer the jump...

After many months of waiting Sling Media have just released the SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone.  At £17.99 it's probably the most expensive app we've bought to date, but is it any good?  Read on to find out and check out the rest of the screenshots...

As energy prices concentrate all our minds on saving electricity, those of us with multiple home servers are looking for ways to consolidate into fewer machines that need to be running 24/7.  Now that VMWare ESXi is free, there's never been a better time to virtualise your servers.  Is not all good news though, with access to certain hardware from virtual machines is still troublesome or impossible.  Read on for one home automators experience moving his home into the virtual world...

Back in the summer I wrote about replacing our aging AV Amp at the heart of our Home Cinema system.  We knew the builders were coming to fit a wood burning stove and so the room needed to be gutted - the perfect excuse to move our home theater into the HiDef world.  The work was completed last December, all except for one vital componant - the new Mac mini.

At last we now have the fantastic user experience of the XBMC days, along with the horse power to play 1080P content.  Here's our quick video on setting the mini up as an HD media player ("basic" 2.0Ghz / 1Gb RAM moodel)...

The Aviosys IP Power 9212 is an inexpensive way to add 8 inputs and 8 outputs to your home automation system that are network addressable either from your LAN or from anywhere in the world via the Internet.  Read on for the mini-review...