A couple weeks ago Ian Dixon had Paul Heitlinger from S1 Digital on his podcast, The Media Center Show, and Paul towards the end was talking about the new Digital Entertainment Platform that they would be demonstrating this year in Atlanta at the Cedia Expo. The Digital Entertainment Platform is basically a set of systems, all revolving around their Entertainment Server, which is based off of Windows Home Server, with thin client type clients based off of Media Center pc’s located around your home.
The Entertainment Server comes in two flavors, The Entertainment Server 400/800 which is based off of a 1U rack mountable chassis, and the 1600/3200 which is based off of a 3U chassis. The two systems will be based off of Windows Home Server, and each model type determines the storage capacity. 400 = 4 Terabytes of storage, 800 = 8 Terabytes and so on. Both systems come with built in blu-ray drives for automated backing up of your media, which then automatically downloads all the meta data, cover art, and automatically catalogs your movies and music. You can also add an option 100 disc blu-ray changer for automated backup of multiple discs without having to swap out discs after each backup, basically you can “set it and forget it”.
All of that is great, but the best feature for the Entertainment Server is the fact you can install up to 8 Cable Card tuners to the Entertainment Server and stream live premium content cable tv over the network to your client pc’s that are running the network TV add-on. The network TV add-on was developed by S1 Digital and is the heart of the Digital Entertainment Platform. Being able to stream live tv to your client pc’s over the network is the holy grail of Media Center htpc platform.
Along with the streaming of premium content over the network, S1 Digital also provides control mechanisms for their platform to be controlled by home automation systems from companies like AMX, Crestron and RTI. So now you can control your media center system via fully automated control systems via touch screen devices.
So now that we have covered all the great features of this system, the down side, it is only available via the custom installer/dealer market. Meaning someone like myself a true enthusiast couldn’t go out to S1, purchase the system and install it myself. So close but yet so far away. If you have the money and really want to stream premium cable card content over the network, this might just be the system for you.
via CE Pro
