With the growing popularity of home cinemas, manufacturers in this industry have started to wake up to the fact that it is the whole experience that counts and as well as having the system to see and hear movies to the full, you should not forget the seating.

To this end a number of new seating products have emerged, which are designed specifically for the avid cinema goer who wants to bring the experience into their home.

These high quality seating solutions can be bought at affordable prices, so you don’t have to spend a fortune turning your room into a mini cinema.

If you have the luxury of a spare room that has been laid out perfectly to make the best use of a home cinema system, this seating can be chosen to accompany it.

You can buy custom-built seats in single and connected multiple varieties, with these fine products upholstered in microfibre fabric or top grain leather to give you maximum comfort. Different colour options are also available.

Should you decide that this seating choice is for you, then you can benefit from heated support, back and foot rests, massage system and even a can cooler!

The best way to enjoy this cinema seating is to position it the required distance away from your flat screen television. This means that you can see the screen properly, as long as you have mounted it on TV wall brackets at the ideal height. All these factors can affect your enjoyment of the entertainment.

As we have explained in the last article, for those avid TV viewers who don’t wish to upgrade to Sky or Virgin Media, Freeview enables them to watch many more channels than they could have done in the past.

All you need to do is get hold of a box, which is quite easy to achieve. You can get Freeview equipment from all the main retailers, while if you take a look online there are many reputable companies offering these boxes.

When you install a Freeview box in your home you do not have to subscribe to anything, all you have to do is ensure you are in a coverage area. This can be checked over the Internet as well, but most of the UK is now up to date.

A digital box usually costs about £20, but for this outlay, you get all the channels mentioned previously and there is no contract to sign.

Once you have made your one-off payment for the digital box itself, assuming you already have the TV, now you just need to plug it in and connect it to your television.

The box can be made to work with your existing TV by use of a SCART lead, which simply plugs in to the back of the unit.

In addition to standard Freeview, you can now also buy Freeview+ digital TV recorders, which let you record, rewind and pause live television. This is a really useful feature to have.

So, get your Freeview box and fit it to a shelf or bracket, just under the TV brackets which are holding your television to the wall.

It is strange when you look back and think that Freeview when it first came out was not something people wanted to embrace. Those that had not upgraded to Sky or cable were generally very content with their TV viewing as it was.

Nowadays, with most households having at least one flat screen TV present, you can see how Freeview has really taken off. If Freeview is not already built in to your television, you can always choose to get a Freeview box.

This gives you access to around 50 channels in full digital so you know there will be at least something on that can keep you entertained for a number of hours.

As well as the TV channels, you also get the opportunity to listen to the 24 digital radio stations on offer too.

With a Freeview box linked to your digital TV, you can enjoy a much better quality of picture and sound, while benefitting from plenty of interactive features which can be accessed quite easily from your remote control.

The Freeview box can now be mounted on the wall like with TV wall brackets as there are now mounts and shelves available which are designed to hold such equipment securely to the wall.

So if you do decide to take the plunge and go for Freeview, the unit won’t have to lie around on a coffee table while your television is mounted above. It can be installed quite nicely below the TV and so this makes things much simpler in terms of your TV viewing.

In the previous post we mainly looked at Blu-ray as a new technology and how it improves over the former technological pace-setter, DVD.

Now we will consider the impact Blu-ray has made on consumers, along with how you can install your Blu-ray player on the wall, to really bring your home cinema setup into the 21st century.

The majority of consumer electronics, music, video game and personal computer companies are behind the Blu-ray format, which means that there are now so many products being released on this format all the time.

In the film industry, this has been unanimous as once HD DVD finally admitted defeat, all the studios decided to release their latest feature films on Blu-ray discs and continue to bring out hits from their back catalogues of movies.

If you take a look online at the most popular DVD and media stores, you will find so many movies in the Blu-ray format, plus review sites which let you know how good the films are and how they have improved on the DVD picture and sound as well as which ones are due for release in the near future.

Once you buy your new Blu-ray player, you can now decide to mount it on a DVD shelf, which works much like TV brackets in that it is fitted into the wall. This mounting option is great as you can place the shelf just below your LCD or plasma TV in order to provide support your equipment, while keeping it from harm.

Blu-ray players and discs (BD) are now commonplace and this format has become the industry standard, replacing DVD as the benchmark for video playback and high-capacity data storage.

In this article and the following post, we will be looking at the blue-violet laser technology and how you can now choose to place it close to your flat screen television, like with TV brackets.

Blu-ray is an optical disc format which was designed by many of the world’s leading electronics, media and computer makers, including the likes of Sony, Apple, Dell, Panasonic and Samsung. Together they formed the Blu-ray Disc Association to work on the high-definition video (HD) medium.

These discs can hold over five times what a traditional DVD can hold and they can store all kinds of data, while enabling for rewriting, recording and playback.

If you have a single-layer disc, then it can store up to 25GB of advanced video and audio, which makes for a remarkable experience in full HD.

It is called “Blue-ray” because it utilises a blue laser disc to write as well as read data, rather than the red laser of the DVD technology. Even though the Blu-ray is the same size as the DVD was, it packs in data much more tightly and stores it within much less space.

Most Blu-ray players are backwards compatible, so they can play any DVDs and CDs you might have. This is a great benefit as you can still make use of your old collection of media products and not have to start all over again.