What they need to fix about home entertainment

The inputs

Once upon a time, not so many years ago, you’d press a button, maybe turn a dial, drop a needle carefully onto a platter, and music would come out of both speakers. Now the cry is heard across the nation: “Did you change the TV again? I just want to watch a DVD!” Then a scream and the sound of a remote bouncing off a glass coffee table.

Component, composite, HDMI, optical, digital coax – it’s hard to imagine that an Atari was once a complicated thing to get running through a TV. Understanding which inputs are best for which kind of content, and why you’re wasting the talents of your Blu-ray player by not using its HDMI output, remains the domain of the tech-nerd.

Here at least is a problem on the verge of a solution. HDMI has done much to simplify home cinema and audio, squirting as it does both audio and video through a single cable. Digital means as long as you don’t wrap it in actual magnets, the signal remains pure and clean and noise-free. And the notched design means you can only stick in the port the right way up.

Take care though, because they keep upgrading HDMI. The latest iteration adds support for 3D content – don’t ever read about how it does this though or your brain will melt. The point is that if you’re used to running your Blu-ray though your AV receiver, just adding in a 3D TV won’t necessarily give you 3D – you may have to upgrade receiver and HDMI cable too.

That’s the down side of digital, the upgrades. But at least you won’t have to learn a whole new colour-coded cabling system. And you never need to find out why the red-green-blue component cables are labelled on your TV as ‘YPbPr’.

The control

Remotes. How did we end up with so many of them in our lives? My first TV had a remote: it was called my sister, and it responded to voice commands and occasional chocolate-coated almonds. Now though, one of the best pieces of home-making advice you can give to someone who lives with a home entertainment enthusiast is “buy a coffee table with little drawers”.

TV remote, AV receiver remote, Telstra T-Box remote, Boxee Box remote, and controllers for your preferred games console. Or consoles. Those little drawers are pretty full, and you can never find the exact remote you need.

And woe-betide if you lose one of those remotes. The T-Box, for instance, has precisely zero buttons on the box itself, rendering it useless without the little (really little) remote. Got kids? Keep the remotes out of reach of yoghurty hands too, because they ain’t splash proof.

Universal remotes were big in the 1990s, but only had to control two or three devices –  tops. The 21st Century equivalent added programmability, 15,000-device databases and touchscreens, but having to sit with the remote pointed at the TV for five or six seconds while everything took its turn to be bathed in IR was beyond most grannies.

There’s an emerging solution to all this though, and it’s called your mobile phone. Many manufacturers – Pioneer springs to mind, for instance – have created iPhone apps (Android apps are on the way too) that control various devices via Bluetooth or even WiFi. Switching control of devices may soon be as simple as tapping different icons.

Though it would be good to see a standard emerge that means pressing power on your Blu-ray player turns on the TV, the receiver, and sets all inputs appropriately. That already exists to some extent with HDMI’s Consumer Electronics Control, but that only works if all your devices are the same brand. And where’s the fun in that?