Gefen's showing a PVR that can record 1080p signals in MP4 format for storage on a USB storage device. There's two models, one that's capable of hitting that 1080p sweet spot, and another lower resolution version.
You can capture and convert TV signals, or plug in a camcorder or other video device. You can plug in multiple sources, such as a set top box and a camcorder, and switch back and forth between recording sources. You can save your video to a USB device remove it and pop it in another computer. This should work with a portable hard drive, flash drive, or flash card in a reader.
Granted, you could do all of these things with any old media center PC, but the Gefen system will do the MP4 USB trick out of the box. It's not entirely clear from the press release if these boxes include hard drives, or if they do all of their recording to flash memory. And if there's a hard drive, I would hope you can record higher quality video to the drive before converting video to portable MP4 files.
[via Engadget]
1. How can you record HD and transfer it? Isn't that against HDCP? And is a USB drive big enough to store a HD program? Or is the mpeg4 saved file a downrezzed version? (which defeats the purpose I think)
Posted at 7:53AM on Jan 11th 2007 by Tom B.