Will someone PLEASE hurry up and release a personal video recorder that allows me to rip all of my DVD's down to DivX (as formats go, DivX is to movies what MP3 is to music) to enable me to watch any one of my proper, official, legit, paid for movies whenever I want from one central device.
Like my iPod allows. Or iTunes. But, obviously, this device would need to sit next to my TV. There are a few ancestor or early descendant products currently on or coming to the market, but...
So, a 400GB DivX PVR with ethernet (802.11g would be cool) which can auto-rip-and-encode my DVD movie collection (quickly would also be nice) for about £300-£500 please.
Thus far, this new Kiss DP-608 is the closest but still cigarless since the hard disk capacity is poxy, network play requires a Windows PC at the other end, and no direct movie ripping.
OK, You can buy some additional software for NAS devices like my new LinkStation to negate the need for a Windows PC server and you can manually rip DVD's, but still it's not good enough yet. B-
Same goes for the current generation of big f**k-off LCD TVs which will all be redundant in about 2-3 years when HDTV gets going. So, my plea to all us pre-emptive laggards like me, keep your money in your pockets until they get their collective finger out. Maybe a big disk, G5 spec Mac Mini around the back end of this year will do the trick?
Or is this future product merely a pipedream, destined not even to make it onto this list?
Like my iPod allows. Or iTunes. But, obviously, this device would need to sit next to my TV. There are a few ancestor or early descendant products currently on or coming to the market, but...
I recall back in the good old bad old days of 1997 when I first discovered the MP3 format, and you had to manually rip and encode MP3's, and on my then lowly CD-ROM drive, it took hours to rip a single CD and about a minute or two to encode a track into an MP3. Times have moved on since, but will it really take another five years to attain the same level of smoothability with movies and video? Hope not.Hard disks are too small at 80GB Those PVRs with big enough hard disks e.g. 400GB, operate and encode in a proprietary format, e.g. not DivX, and won't rip DVD movies directly anyway. See next point They don't rip DVD's in the effortless way you can rip CD's into MP3's, meaning you have to rip and encode on a PC and then transfer. Major arseache They have network ports -good- but which only work if you connect them to a PC with host software running -bad-. How about enabling them to link directly to a NAS or external USB/Firewire hard disk (without having to own, let alone switch on a PC host).
So, a 400GB DivX PVR with ethernet (802.11g would be cool) which can auto-rip-and-encode my DVD movie collection (quickly would also be nice) for about £300-£500 please.
Thus far, this new Kiss DP-608 is the closest but still cigarless since the hard disk capacity is poxy, network play requires a Windows PC at the other end, and no direct movie ripping.
OK, You can buy some additional software for NAS devices like my new LinkStation to negate the need for a Windows PC server and you can manually rip DVD's, but still it's not good enough yet. B-
Same goes for the current generation of big f**k-off LCD TVs which will all be redundant in about 2-3 years when HDTV gets going. So, my plea to all us pre-emptive laggards like me, keep your money in your pockets until they get their collective finger out. Maybe a big disk, G5 spec Mac Mini around the back end of this year will do the trick?
Or is this future product merely a pipedream, destined not even to make it onto this list?