"At its heart, the HG-01S is a hard drive-based video recorder with an additional photo album feature but what differentiates it from some of the other digital video recorders or home servers on the market is the inclusion of a Web server and networking functions that allow recorded video to be viewed from other computers across the Internet.
It has a 120GB hard drive and records in MPEG-2 at 720-pixel by 480-pixel resolution at either 8 megabits per second, 4 mbps, or 2 mbps. This translates to 30 hours of video in the highest quality mode, 60 hours at medium quality, and 115 hours at low quality. It can also transcode MPEG-2 video into MPEG-4, which is a newer and more efficient video compression system.
At home and in front of the television, accessing the device is much like any other hard drive-based video recorder. A graphical menu offers quick access to recorded TV programs.
Away from the living room, there are a number of options. Around the house, a built-in wireless LAN (802.11b) adapter offers access to any suitably equipped computer while the Internet can be used to access and view recorded programs and images when away from home--if the device is hooked up to a broadband connection via its Ethernet port.....
From a personal computer, it is possible to view recorded TV programs and it is here that the MPEG-4 transcoding function becomes handy.... The MPEG-4 data stream is much lighter. This can also be viewed on some PDAs.....
Another function of the device is its family photo album feature which collects and can display snapshots. These can be transferred to the server directly from a memory card via a PC Card slot on the front of the device. If the user wishes, some can also be published on the Internet for other people to view either from a personal computer of cellular telephone. Members of the family can also send images taken with camera-equipped cell phones back to the server which will store them in its memory.
The HG-01S will go on sale in Japan on February 15 and cost around $848. Plans for overseas sales of the device were not announced." [PC World]
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
