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Once upon a time, long, long ago home entertainment media was simple.

In my youth it was easy to understand and easy to use. If you wanted to listen to music there were two choices, turn on the radio or play a record. If you wanted to watch something you had three choices, go to the movies, watch home movies, or turn on the TV. We had to wait for the television to warm up and we had to get up to change the channel. But we knew how to turn on the TV and how to change the channel.

Now home entertainment is fracturing. It is difficult to keep up with the frequent announcements from the hardware, software and content vendors. I believe it is impossible for the non-techie to comprehend and keep up with the mess the entertainment industries, consumer electronics industries, computer makers and software companies have created.

The seemingly simple task of buying a new HDTV is illustrative, as it requires education in display technologies, screen resolutions and connectors. Once the HDTV is acquired, the buyer is faced with cabling issues - what type, what lengths and how do you put it all together. Finally, one has to learn the new remote control and how to work the HDTV's features, set up the screen, and adjust for the room lighting. This is daunting and it is only the TV. When you want to integrate your music, photos, home videos, downloaded videos, streaming webcasts, podcasts, and games the task becomes geometrically more difficult.

What can you do to help keep up and keep it manageable other than reading my tips? Keep these trends in mind.

Content is everywhere and the choices are myriad. Try not to wed yourself to any one system or technology. Today’s entertainment media is a Tower of Babel built on competing technologies, operating systems, connectors and DRM restrictions. Our enjoyment of this great new media is often more than offset by the frustrations in acquiring, accessing and maintaining the infrastructure.

This stuff is expensive and often obsolete by the time you get it home. Where you can, use non-proprietary file formats and hardware to make it easy on you. You can rip the songs from a CD onto almost any computer or MP3 player but it is much harder to take the DRM encrusted song or video bought at iTunes and play it elsewhere. Home networking with a media server is the way to be thinking.

Home entertainment media requires gigabytes or terabytes of storage space. When you buy computers or home entertainment devices get the largest hard drives or storage you can reasonably afford. You will need it. Remember that you do not want to lose those files so you need to add extra hard drives to back up this stuff.

Video is moving to higher definition. It is too early to know where it will end. 1080i resolution is giving way to 1080p in HDTV. I saw an announcement last week that a company was building 2160p monitors for industrial use. I expect it is only a matter a time until it becomes available to consumers. On the DVD front, we have the replay of VHS v. Betamax in HD-DVD v. Blu-ray. You should probably avoid taking any position on this until the dust settles, if it ever does.

Once upon a time, home entertainment media was simple, but that was long ago.