nce all the entertainment devices in your living room — and your kitchen and playroom — are physically linked, they will need a common language. Many software companies are looking at this frontier as the next operating system — not one for individual PC's, but an overall program that can coordinate components along with the storage and playback of your digital media files.

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Microsoft has unveiled its proposed solution, a home-entertainment platform called Freestyle. Running from a PC but networked to other devices, Freestyle would give you command of your audio and video players, using the TV set to display a graphical interface. You would see menus with options like "Play DVD" or "Browse Photo Album," while behind the scenes, Freestyle would keep track of every file and device in your home.

Client boxes in each room — other audio or video components, or relay stations responsive to a remote — would carry instructions to and from the PC. "Anything on the network that can also read media files and has the connecting piece of software can be a Freestyle client," said Mike Toutonghi, Microsoft's vice president for the eHome division. Whether to make a product or software update compatible with Freestyle would be up to the maker.

Working with Samsung and NEC in Asia and Hewlett-Packard in the United States, Microsoft will introduce Freestyle as an expanded version of Windows XP — essentially the same operating system with enhanced entertainment offerings. Mr. Toutonghi's description of the first Freestyle PC — with a host of typical entertainment applications, a video-recorder program for storing TV shows and a remote control — sounds a lot like Sony's Vaio MX entertainment PC, available since last fall.

Other software companies are designing similar (if less ambitious) home-entertainment interfaces. Mediabolic will handle the next generation of entertainment servers and clients for Pioneer, while OpenGlobe, which powers the Kenwood Sovereign Entrι entertainment hub and several high-end audio products from Escient, is working on a convergence device with Thomson. Also, hardware designers like TiVo and Digeo want to extend their interfaces to other devices.