Posted by Bob on 09/07/06 12:03

On Wed, 6 Sep 2006 07:58:45 -0700, "Bill's News"
<BillsNews@pcmagic.net> wrote:

>Aside from the erosion of the nuclear (or new-klew-yar?) family, the
>problem with the Ethernet connection to a stand-alone recorder is that
>you will not likely have 4 family members each viewing a recording of
>their own choice from the player on 4 different PCs while the player
>is also recording 2 or more channels and possibly playing a DVD for a
>local TV viewer having no PC. This is why I feel that a NIC for the
>stand-alone is underkill. The family with multiple PCs is already
>networked; the transfer of the entire content of the USB drive to
>their network takes but seconds to accomplish. A fresh, empty, USB
>drive is plugged into the recorder in its place. The size of this
>hard drive then becomes whimsical on the part of the user. In this
>case, the stand-alone player's internal hard-drive would be quite
>generous at 80 gB or so, merely enough to hold the OS, the guide, the
>users' program selections, and a generous timeshift buffer - and it
>would not need to be scalable by source video definition.

You make a good case for using USB flash memory and doing away with
the network connection. However it does entail extra operations, which
I suppose can be overlooked if the interface is super friendly.

Plug in memory, point and click, download, remove memory. If it's that
easy, then I am sold. Screw Ethernet.


--

"There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress."
--Mark Twain

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