HD TV gets HD HDD DVR

[alxian]

High Definition TV, meet High Density Harddrive based Digital video Recorder.

Hitachi Wooo 1TB DVR

translation by google. ~passable

link from xbit labs

at the high quality setting (1080i or 1080p they do not specify) you should get, the site claims, ~128 hours from a 1 TB harddrive DVR such as the new Hitachi Wooo, certainly more than enough for an entire seasons worth of Family Guy in HD quality (possibly every episode to date), but information overload may set in in such marathon sessions so queueng up only a couple of episodes of different shows may prove more practical. at consumer level HD (HDDVD/Blu-RAY) you'll get days worth of storage), suffice it to say you'll get much more time than from a dvd-ram disk with much the same functionality, and the 2300$ price tag will seem more reasonable once you realise just how much of your favorite content you can digitize and have at the touch of a button.

example

for everyday soaps/animated shows you could encode at very tight compression ratios an SDTV "low" def setting since you'll be tossing the file after watching them. this allows enough room for several users to have their shows held in storage like a VHS tape or dvd-ram/rw of today. a family can make use of the 1TB without stepping on each other toes or cluttering up the living room with dvd sboxes or cd cases.

"MM Research Institute predicts that Japan's DVD recorder market will grow 26% to 5.6 million units in the current financial year to next March, up from 4.43 million in 2004/05. "

while here at home the market for dvd-rw/ram based DVRs (stand alone or as part of a mediacenter PC has yet to really take off), as more HD content becomes available and cheap "HD ready" sets replace the master unit in our homes, with 1080p sets with fancy hdmi connectors for the well to do, HD will catch on here too, possibly once HD movies and consoles become available and demand is piqued ( late 2006 middle 2007).

pretty soon also you'll have the option of recording to a 1/2TB optical disk (rendering the HDDVD BLU-RAY question quite moot long before people start putting serious money into products based on blu-ray or hddvd).

for a comparison of what 1TB of storage space may mean, thats 100-200 dvds on one disk, optical and hdd respectively. while a picture quality jump i think was 50-60x (bit for bit, 1080p vs 480p) slightly offsetting the huge increase in space because of the better quality, bearing in mind again that the current standard will still be available for recording to the drive meaning potentially weeks of content.

[Tormod]

1TB...finally room for all my late nite "science" movies.

[alexander]

I bet my friend can run out of space even with a TB drive, he's got a 400 gig one completely filled with music, and he is still complaining about not having enough space....