Z,
A little more information on digital vcr's w/hard drives. Personally, I am not as excited by the potential here as many. I think the most important thing to remember is they are intended as short term storage and not archival. In other words, the multimedia content is not intended to stay resident on the hard drive for very long.
This means, IMHO, that hard drives included in these devices do not need cutting edge capacities of over, say 8-13 gigabytes. In fact, as capacities of desktop hard drives increase, the excess capacity can be used (in a home network environment) as a digital vcr.
Some additional links--
zdnet.com
atitech.com
(Interesting but not strictly a hard drive based digital vcr)
www8.zdnet.com
winmag.com
computer.org
By no means an exhaustive list-- see Philips, GIC, Sony, Nokia, Compaq, Microsoft and follow links resulting from a search for set top box or home networks. Also intersting is VLSI, Broadcom, National Semiconductor, Intel, TI.
In sum, I think think this stand alone-digital vcr w/harddrive is just a dead end fork on the road to the home network.
Lord knows I'm often wrong,
Yogi |
