How many people having trouble finding file that they’ve misplaced somewhere or they are not sure which computer it’s on. You know whether it’s a song that you have downloaded or whether it is a digital photo, I mean that is a classic case we take our digital cameras. And now, we have more than one computer in our house, we can never find which computer it is on. Well, I am going to show you a device called a Media Hub. It was sent to us from our friends at Cisco. And it’s a device that really solves that problem.
The idea is that you hook it up to your router. And most of us have a router in our house now because we’ve got all these different computers. And they all want to access the internet, so your high-speed internet connection is generally attached to a router. So you take this device to that router and you plug it in. It’s not a computer, there is no place for a monitor or a keyboard to go into it. It’s essentially an external hard drive but it is more than that because once you have connected it to your home network, it goes out and it crawls around. And it finds all the computers that are connected. I can do this for both PCs and Macs. It looks for photos, it looks for video files, it looks for music. And it basically takes all of those files in those computers and brings it back to the central place.
So now, you don’t have to worry which computer you put the photo on because it bringing it all back here. And it’s more or less doing it automatically. Once you’ve got it all stored on here and you’ve kind of added all your PCs to the network. You get this one real simple interphase, there is a little bit of software that you load on to each of the computers. But once you’ve got it loaded on there, you can see they kept in dead simple, you log in through an internet browser. So, whether using Explorer, Firefox it doesn’t really matter, but you get this one screen here and you can see I’ve got my music, my photos, my videos and then also file browsing.
The idea is that you can just simply click on the button, it doesn’t matter what computer the music was on because now it’s just all here. It’s easy to find, it’s easy to search and it it’s right on this computer. And you can listen to it from any computer on the house, same thing with digital photos, we’ll just click on the photo tab. And when you click on that, all the photos are now listed there and again you can search it because it’s all been brought back to this one place.
Another cool thing about it, you can see that I am not connected to this. I am connected wireless to our network here. And it is accessing the server. Well, you can do that from remote location as well. So, if you go to an internet café or go over to your grandma’s house, it doesn’t really matter. You cannot log on to the same device through the internet and actually share those same photos and music and video files and all the rest of this. So, it works really well. Because it is a network storage device, it does also do backups so every computer that is in the house, you can choose it to back those up, so you’ve got a good backup device. I’d say it’s primary function, it’s that Media Hub bring all that music to the forefront.
A really cool feature and this is really how it is going to change your household is you can connect this up to different devices around the house like your television set, so if you’ve got something like an Xbox360, you can now use the Xbox to basically access the things like the music and the videos and now watch all of that on your big screen TV. And that is really where it becomes a powerful entertainment sort of home media device. It is called the Media Hub, it’s from Linksys by Cisco. There is a few other companies that manufacture them. One of my favorites is the—media smart server and you might want to take a look at that one as well.
They’re all sort of around the same price point, very expandable, they’ve got a hard drive usually that comes in them. But if you look on the top here you can add second hard drives to them as well to give you a more space because the more photos and the more videos and more music you download, you might want to add more space to your drive as well.
Pretty cool idea, I definitely think it’s the way of the future so we are going to start to see more and more of these devices hit the market.
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