We live in the future: my new touchscreen media center (+ video demo!)

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Ariel demonstrates her new story-viewing machine. Yay, stories!

We recently ran a story about getting rid of your TV, but today I’m going to talk about going the other way: after a decade of not having a screen in our living room, I finally decided I was sick of watching movies on a laptop. This is the story of how we got a TV, but how it’s a crazy futuristic touchscreen media center that cost less than many widescreen TVs.

When the iPads came out a couple years ago, I remember looking at one and thinking “Hmm, you know what I want for our living room? Something like this only TV-sized and with good speakers, that I can mount on the wall. Then we could use it as both a stereo and a TV!”

See, after over a decade of not having a TV in our house, my family has reached a place where we only consume media via the internet. Rhapsody is our radio, and all our tv and movies come from a combo of Hulu + Amazon Prime & Instant Watch + Netflix Instant + YouTube. Really, I just want a big iPad to hang on the wall and bring me my stories!

Using a laptop worked fine, but our geighbor has a nice TV and we go over there to watch Glee once a week and I’ve slowly realized that you know what? I work on a laptop all day, and sometimes I just want to sit on a fucking couch and watch some shit! An enormous iPad on the wall would be just perfect: it’s a computer, but not a computer. It’s got a touchy screen (no need for stupid remotes or keyboards/mice flapping around) and is nice and compact.

This dream seemed like one of those “someday” wishes: the technology would get there eventually, but for now I would just have to sit and wish. Little did I know that DUH, the technology was already there and it wasn’t even that expensive — only a bit more than an iPad, really.

The device in question? A 23″ HP Touchsmart 520 mounted on the wall. Total cost for the computer and the wall-mount: about $850 (which is to say about the same price as some 40″ televisions — which are ONLY televisions and don’t have touchscreens or the entire internet at your command).

The set-up was relatively straight-forward, although we brought in our friend Jason, who has magical A/V nerdery skills to help us because neither Andreas nor I can be trusted with power tools. (Hey: we know our skills, and we know our blind spots.) Here’s how we did it:

STEP 1: PICK LOCATION

We decided to mount the screen on the wall that is the least visible when you enter the room. After a decade of not having a screen in our living room, both Andreas and I were pretty committed to NOT feeling like the room suddenly revolved around the Black Screen Of Electronic Distractions. The way the living room is set up, when you enter you don’t see the screen at all.

The wall had been used as a place to display my 11th grade acrylic masterpiece, “Gay Peary.” This isn’t our current configuration (we replaced the pink chair with a loveseat) but gives you an idea of the spot:

new tv spot

STEP 2: PREPARE COMPUTER

Before we went any further, I spent a couple hours setting up the new computer. As many of you know, most PCs come out of the box dripping with bloatware, and the Touchsmart 520 is no exception. So, the night before we were going to mount the computer on the wall, I sat down in front of it and did this stuff:

  • uninstalled some crap programs
  • installed 47 recommended Windows updates
  • set up Microsoft Security Essentials
  • installed Chrome
  • added my core media bookmarks logged in: Rhapsody, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix

Then I toyed with the included HP Touchsmart Magic Canvas application, a touch-friendly desktop replacement application that I thought would be really fucking stupid that turned out to actually be pretty awesome for touchscreen computers that are going to be used without a keyboard and mouse. It basically runs on top of Microsoft Windows, and turns your computer screen into a sometime that feels more like a mobile phone screen. This promo vid is CHEEZE, but gets the point across:

I set it so that the Carousel was just my media bookmarks, so that getting to, say, Rhapsody would be a one tap process.

STEP 3: ATTACH MOUNT TO WALL

We got an articulated wall mount (VideoSecu LCD LED TV Wall Mount Full Motion with Swivel Articulating Arm for 23-37) so that the screen could either be tucked flat against the wall, or easily pulled out at movie watching. Jason spent some time testing to make sure the stud he was attaching the mount to was really, REALLY solid — and he bought a mount that was weight tested for much heavier than we needed. With a toddler in the house, god only knows what could happen.

Wall mount!

STEP 4: PREP COMPUTER FOR MOUNTING

Thankfully, HP provides a handy-dandy step-by-step tutorial for this process, which still managed to freak me out a bit because it included taking off the back of the machine, removing the base, and not breaking anything. Jason was a pro, though:

Taking off the computer's base

Off came the computer’s base, so it was essentially just a big flat panel screen.

Putting it all back together

STEP 5: ATTACH COMPUTER TO MOUNT

TA-DA!This was actually the easiest step: a couple screws and VOILA. Suddenly there was a sweet-ass touchscreen media center on the wall.

Since the computer is an all-in-one with everything built in (wifi antenna, speakers, all of it), there’s really only the one butt-ugly cord dangling down. (We’ve got schemes for hiding it, but that’ll have to be a future post.)

The built-in speakers are HP’s Beats Audio, which sounds pretty solid. I mean, is this a throbbing subwoofer with melt-your-face bass? No, but we live in a condo with thin walls and realistically: we can’t bump that loud anyway. (Even more realistically, despite being retired ravers, we don’t tend to bump that loud any more regardless.) The audio is crisp and solid and thumpy enough for our purposes, but also did great when we curled up to watch Downton Abbey.

Although we have the Touchsmart’s wireless mouse and keyboard on a shelf near-by if we need them, the touchscreen is pretty well equipped at doing what you need. It’s one tap to open a on-screen keyboard, and you can even hand write words that gets translated to on-screen text. It feels pretty fancy. Here’s me doing a little demo for y’all:

(The first minute or so is fuzzy, but then it snaps into better focus.)

In closing, this solution is working great for us. It’s not perfect (no remote, sometimes it’s hard to hit smaller screen targets like the X to close Chrome tabs) but it’s working out really well for us and it’s so nice to be able to plop on the couch and just watch some stories. YAY, STORIES!

Comments on We live in the future: my new touchscreen media center (+ video demo!)

  1. This is a great option! I have never owned a television in my adult life, but I hate watching stuff on my laptop, and there’s a TON of stuff I’ve been wanting to watch/told I MUST watch. I’m going to look into this more closely!

      • I see this as a pretty separate solution from the “laptop + second monitor” (which I’ve also done).

        For me, I wanted something on the wall and separate — I was sick of the snakepit of cords and wires from our laptop to a second monitor. Plus, I didn’t want to be futzing with a mouse/keyboard every time I wanted to play music — I wanted to walk up, touch the picture of the album, and listen to it.

        It’s a big difference for me: I spend all day working on keyboard and mouse. I really need my media consumption to be separate.

  2. My parents just got a computer like this! But the one they have has an actual TV tuner in it as well, so they can watch the basic channels as well on it…

    Anyway, I dig the wall mount idea. The BF and I are wanting to do something similar when we’re finally not stuck being long-distance anymore, but we were thinking of using a cheap tower as a media center and hooking it up to one of our TVs we already have.

  3. Oh man, I’m so glad you mentioned you had plans for hiding the ugly cord. My husband and I are a little OCD when it comes to cords dangling, so when we wall-mounted our tv, we actually installed one of these things: http://www.amazon.com/Vanco-120614X-Custom-Two-Piece-Single/dp/B001702I16/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329249473&sr=8-1
    and it was pretty darn easy with a drywall knife (probably not even necessary) and a stud finder (which I assume you already have since you installed your computer on a stud). Makes things so much neater. The only problem we had was that our outlet thingy went INTO the wall (instead of coming out) and since it was in our basement we had cement block about half an inch behind the drywall, and had to get creative. But anyway, it looks fantastic now! So good luck!

    • Oh, we also had a problem because there was a “stud” horizontally in the wall which we hadn’t looked for with the stud finder. So watch out for that.

  4. This looks pretty amazing. And I love that there’s only one cord.

    We have a television and a PS3 (we’re gamers) so we use the PS3 to access our home computer, the internet, etc. to meet our tv-watching needs. We could really just get rid of the cable, except I’m not sure of alternative ways to get access to the hockey games that my husband can’t live without. Eventually though!

    Excellent use of technology! Looking forward to see how it continues to work out for you.

  5. So happy to see this! We also have an HP touchscreen that we use in much the same way, but when we bought it the salesperson told us it couldn’t be wall mounted. I was bummed but it still works pretty well in the space we have. Now that I know this – it will be even better.

  6. I love this! It’s out of my current price range (sad panda face) but I’ll put it on the “what to do it the current media center dies” list.

    We have two set up: a full wall projector in the living room — no screen, projector projects to the full wall and is hooked up to surround sound and a wifi Bluray that serves up all our media. And my Valentine’s project, a small TV / DVD combo (bought during our move almost two years ago instead of another breakable portable DVD player — we didn’t have access to the projector when we lived in a flat for a year) that I’m planning on hooking up to either another BluRay player (bought one refurbed: it busted the first day) or a Roku or something. Mostly for listening to music while folding laundry, but also for snugly going to bed Hulu watching.

    Not having cable rocks!

  7. One of the things that’s really cool about this setup is that Ariel has broken the cable television bounds that still have me chained. I bought a new TV and Blu-ray player recently and both of them are “smart” enough to play all the non-cable media sources I use : Netflix, Vudu, Hulu, Amazon, etc.

    I briefly toyed with dismissing the TV portion of my cable bill but I’m ridiculously attached to my TiVo box and I’m also not quite sure it will result in a cost savings. For example, will my addiction to HBO shows bust through my yearly cable bill and then some??

    Has anybody done a cost analysis of this?

  8. Yay!! It does exist.

    I’ve been telling my husband that I want “a big ipad” so I can mount it on my wall and have a computer and TV all at once so i can be entertained and look stuff up all at once.

    When we do our reno, this is going in the budget.

  9. very cool. I recently went to a friends house and he had the most awesome entertainment center. All their movies and media was converted to digital and could be brought up through a very cool menue on the TV. The TV stand wasn’t crowded with DVDs like mine is and instead had some old game systmes on display for asthetic value 🙂

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