A home entertainment system can distribute music, TV, movies, and other audio and video through the same network that connects your household computers to one another and to the Internet. Over-the-air, cable, or satellite TV and radio, music from a CD player or stored on a hard drive, and videos from DVDs can all provide source material for a system that can play music or display video in any room with a network connection.

There's a whole industry out there that supports very expensive home entertainment systems, complete with video-screening rooms (the high-tech popcorn maker is optional at extra cost), TV screens built into walls or rising out of hidden cabinets in the kitchen or bedroom, multiple speakers in every room, and preprogrammed mood lighting. But unless you have a spare $10,000 or $20,000 (or more—a lot more) to spend on fancy equipment and custom installation, those systems are not particularly practical. Most of us will have to settle (!) for something considerably less extravagant. If you've already wired your house or apartment for a data network, you can add an entertainment server and connect stereos or TVs in several rooms without spending a small fortune. You can also connect entertainment devices to your network in stages, rather than spend a lot of money at one time.

A tremendous variety of equipment and services is available that can fit within the home entertainment systems category, but for this book's purposes, I'll consider the processes of distributing music, video, and games through a home network and playing them on TVs, stereo systems, surround sound systems, and table "radios."