Wouldn't you like to have all your photos, movies, music and family video stored in one location as a complete digital archive? Well, for me the idea of a central digital media archive at home is coming true. The building blocks of my home media network are

• a huge file server, that stores all the movies, music and pictures
• a LAN running through the house
• dedicated clients in the rooms that allow to play content from the file server

Most of you might already see the advantages such a centralized digital media archive has - even for use at home. However, I cannot resist to point at the main advantages as I see them:

• concurrent availability. This means, that two or more clients at your home can access the same data for playback. As an example, you can hear the same music in two rooms. Ok, you can do that with CDs as well, but you would have to take them with you while going from one room to another.
• ease of backup. It is quite obvious, that you can easily make backups of your media data for data security.
• ease of use. Especially when it comes to large media archives it is far more convenient to organize this as data on a file server as doing it with physical media. This mainly drills down to 3 advantages:
  • You can quite easily delete and insert data, without messing up any physical structures (think of photo album, resorting slides, etc.)
  • You can search the archive. This is very convenient for music data, for example.
  • If the archive is well organized, you have the media you search for right at your fingertips.