Need time-shifting TV, but your cable operator doesn’t offer it? Toshiba announced a high end DVR featuring a 5 Terabyte Hard Drive – it supports 1 TB for your traditional DVR needs, and 4 TB dedicated to continuous recording for time shift TV of up to 6 channels for up to 15 days. The DVR includes 8 tuners, as well as a 3D Blu-ray player so you don’t need additional electronics hanging around your house.
With a a 5 TB hard drive, I’d much rather use it for a digital movie storage locker – like my old 200 disk CD jukebox . Despite its mechanical arm and the occasional disk jam, the jukebox was much more reliable than iTunes on my Apple TV – which doesn’t work with my Buffalo NAS (because its not a true authenticated iTunes server), and is spotty with my usually-on PC as the iTunes server is sometimes up, and sometimes comes across the odd log-in failure. And putting my DVD movies onto the NAS? Occasionally I can get passed the CSS and associated technologies to make a digital copy (under fair-use regulations, of course) for frequently watched kids programs – but what a nightmare.
Alas, neither of these technologies will make under my Hannukah Menorah this year – both because of the 200,000 ($2600) price tag, and because it will only be sold in Japan – where only about 10 basic cable channels support recording – so recording 6 channels continuously is an even bigger deal.
(Thanks to pocket-lint for the report)
