Digital Theatre media centre: Home cinema hunk

By Ian Morris on 20 March 2007, 12:01pm

While Crave was pounding the floors at CeBIT last week we were collared by a man from a company called Digital Theatre, who was very keen indeed to show us a home cinema PC. Normally we would run away from such a person, but this one pointed us at something made out of brushed metal. How could we resist?

We were stunned by the aesthetics of the machine. It's built around a case made by a company called OrigenAE and features an enormous 12.1-inch motorised, touchscreen LCD that controls what you're watching. This enormous silver box has a pretty impressive visual impact. No more will people come to your house to watch a movie and have nothing to say during the boring bits -- talk will be all about this beast.

The standard spec is pretty impressive, with 1TB of storage. That's more than enough to record plenty of television shows from the high-end Nebular digital TV tuner card that comes bundled. The machine also has a built in HD DVD drive, which is excellent news. Of course, if HD DVD ends up losing the format war, you can just bung a Blu-ray player in the slot instead.

And if all of that doesn't sell this media centre to you, you can also play games on it. We were told it is designed to do both media centre and gaming duties equally well, although we don't have a finalised spec for the gubbins inside. The machine is cooled by some pretty quiet fans, which should mean you don't have your viewing interrupted by what sounds like an aeroplane taking off.

Apparently when it hits the shops in the next few months it will cost around £2,000. We've been promised a sample of this Digital Theatre system -- as soon as we get our filthy paws on it, we'll bring you a review in full. -IM