Let’s face it, the home theatre PCs that were once all the rage are simply too complicated for their intended purpose. Output via S-Video to your TV is never going to look good without a good made-for-TV user interface. Starting last year, we began seeing a flood of multimedia machines coming from Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Originally quite cost-prohibitive, the devices are now affordable enough to be a welcome addition to any home theatre. There’s a great new example in the Pixel Magic MediaBox HD Multimedia Player. It can play any video format you toss at it, including DivX, XviD, DVD (.vob and .iso), as well as audio (.mp3 and .wav) files. For the absolutely best video quality, it supports the still-costly HDMI interface. However, you can also use DVI, which is a lot more reasonable, and the resolution is still quite good. Remember, the price is just for the unit, which looks like a fancy external hard drive enclosure. You’ll still have to supply the storage. Via