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HP's Digital-Audio Entertainment Box
ARP writes: "Hewlett Packard has introduced the de100c Digital Entertainment Center, a one of a kind stand-alone product that combines Internet features and digital multimedia capabilities. The unit connects to the television and stereo, from where it allows for organizing and storing MP3 and CD music that can be stored on its 40GB hard drive. It also comes with a CD writer for burning CDs on the fly, and USB connections for transferring files from and to portable devices such as PDAs. Coolest of all is the ability to connect through the Internet (broadband and dial-up both supported) to download music. The de100c is expected to hit the stores around the holidays. More info and shot at RatedPC." If this had the video capabilities like TiVo, it might be a much easier sell, but still looks like a useful component.
First, does anyone have an idea about how much this will cost, what PDAs it works with, what kind of outputs it has, ANYTHING? A lot more information is needed.
Second, why USB? Perhaps this is for compatibility with the aforementioned PDAs/MP3 players, but IMHO it should have firewire for future scalability.
Third, cost could easily kill this thing. It doesn't seem like it has many more features than say a GCT Allwell set-top (which is easily hackable), and the aesthetics of it certainly don't appeal to me, so the only way that I would consider it is if the price was *very* low.
Fourth, how much you want to bet that the RIAA will have a field day trying to push against this thing? Maybe they already have a foothold (i.e. you wont be able to burn anything unless its a digitally signed download, etc.?) with this. I myself don't trust set-top devices for burning, especially not with the latest digital rights management push.
Fifth, Access to RealNetworks will never convince me to shell out money. In fact, nothing Real has ever done anything worthy of purchasing, in my opinion. I just don't think its a selling point.
On a side note, all of my home entertainment equipment is Black, what's with this sudden push to make everything blue && || silver? Cut it out!
I saw it at Linuxworld in San Francisco. It apperently runs linux on 'encrypted' hardware. The guy demo-ing it pretty much challenged anyone to crack it.
You can only play media files with DMR controls on this box, it won't play MP3's...
Chris.
-- I don't have a cool sig.
There was an update. The detail specifications of this thing is now on the site. It uses a Pentium2 566MHz processor!
Is it a device to give the RIAA execs nightmares or wet dreams? We all know that the MPAA and RIAA would both like to uninvent the computer, and this sort of specialized digital entertainment box may be just the thing they need, a special-purpose device that they have near absolute control over.
We all know that digital rights management is impossible to enforce on a general-purpose computer. But on a special-purpose entertainment console like this one, it will be trivial to do so except against the most determined cracker, if it has been designed properly.
Maybe the CD writer it's got is one of those that only writes those junk CD's that you can't play on a computer...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
The general idea of a pc-based entertainment center is, actually, a great idea.
A PC gains more and more entertainment capabilities. You can use a PC for game playing, listening to MP3, watching DVDs, as a smart TV (a-la TiVo), and the list goes on.
There is one problem with a TV, though: it is not designed to sit in your living-room.
So, an entertainment center designed to sit at your living room and function as a combained DVD/CD/MP3 player, TiVo, internet set-top box and play-station is a great idea.
The problem with HP's offering is that it focuses only on the music-related features, and hence it is may end up as a pretty expensive toy that have a relatively small set of features.
Out of the list of suggested features, I may be willing to give-up on the game-playing features (it would be difficult to have a rich game library unless the product is based on an existing gaming platform, or is windows-based PC under the hood). I would like to see a combined DVD/CD/MP3/TiVo with internet conectivity, though.
According to their specs, they are using a 4/8/4 CD-RW (rips music at 4x, writes 8x, write CDRW at 4x). Considering 32/16/10 are the minimal specs for CDRs now, it looks like they's using this box to get rid of outdated CDR stock they got.
I don't know about you
The HP drives are just rebadged Philips internals, the early ones sucked, I had a HP 6020 2x CDR in 1997, it died within months, they replaced it with another, it died.
In fact the products sucked that much that a bunch of US consumers initated a class action suit against HP and Philips and won. I believe you're entitled to $150 or a new drive if you were unfortunate enough to have purchased this drive.
I had a nice little chat to HP UK about the above class action and they offered to send me a new SCSI CDRW drive, it was to shut me up, I guess they didn't want risk the same action happening in the UK, especially now precedent had been set.
We're not talking about $90 CDRW's you see today, I paid £350 (~$500) for the 6020 SCSI in 1997, so you can see why people felt a little cheated when it died after 4 months.
Now, I'm not usually one for supporting the heranging of companies with frivolous claims (e.g. hot coffee burnt me, doh) but there were some serious technical deficiencies with this drive which shouldn't have gone to production in its current state, in effect many people became beta testers at a very expensive price, so they did have good grounds.