Memory card maker SanDisk is to announce Take.TV, a video portal and related PC-to-TV device on Monday, according to NeeTeeVee.
The portal will allow users to download content including television shows and films onto their personal computers for transfer onto the Take.TV device that can then be manually taken from your PC to TV for viewing.
As the photo above demonstrates, SanDisk has a rather liberal view of the word simplify.
The device is said to be able to play back videos encoded in DivX, Xvid, and MPEG4, and possibly support HD (although how it would do this over analogue plugs is beyond me).
Microsoft has tried for years now to bring PC’s to the loungeroom with its Windows Media Center Edition product (since folded into Vista) but has failed. However there is an increasing market for network aware devices, Apple TV is perhaps a poor example but products from Netgear, Zensonic and others (I own a Zensonic Z500) provide smart DVD players that also stream video and music over a network and from the internet.
With a possible list price of $99 SanDisk may well find a willing audience, but in a networked world it’s more than a little bit bizarre that a product such as this requires manual transportation from A to B.
If i am not wrong there all we need is a simple connector which can connect the tv in via moniter jack…?
I sure don’t want to move around to transfer movies from my PC to my TV… hell no! I don’t even want to have to turn on my PC to watch movies on my TV.
What I want is the combination of a PVR and a media streamer. A device that can:
- record movies on a local HD
- play movies/music/pictures from a PC / network attached storage device
- play movies/music/pictures from the local HD
- transfer files between local HD and network shares
- work with PLAIN network shares
That would be ideal!
Definitely a strange device.
However, I am still waiting for a normal wireless network media player that does not crash, has adequate codec, subtitles and pan / scan / zoom support.
I have purchased Buffalo Wireless A&G couple of months ago and was extremely disappointed – freezes, no subs, no zooming!
Brilliant! I think it’s pretty cool! For carrying things from A to B at home seems a little bit pointless for geeks who have everything hooked up, but I can imagine plugging one of these in loaded up with a presentation would be much nicer than dragging around a computer, or get two and fill them up with psychedelic footage and hook them into a club’s VJ mixer. Or if you go to a family reunion or something you could have a slide show type dealie….
If we could run a video Ipod off it… well…
Sandisk aren’t really doing anything new with this – A year ago I bought a laptop HDD enclosure that has a dedicated circuitboard for playing media (divx, jpg, mp3, etc) off the HDD. Means connecting to my laptop USB every now and then to upload new files, but works well for me. Cost was about the same as this, but I can have more than the couple of Gb this flash drive would hold.
At least they could have thrown a component cable. I think the ideia is nice, some people put their lifes in pen drives. And now that they are holding already 8 gigs, I think it would be a nice equipment to have to watch series and stuff.
Well you can just watch TV on http://www.chooseandwatch.com/ and not spending $$ on that expensive stuff.
Globally speaking, every device simplifying the connection between a PC and a large flat TV to transmit video content is useful :
The PC becomes the main, if not unique, device to receive and store movies, from the Internet & VOD servers. For young people and students, the PC is also the only screen to watch the movies. For older people, the large flat TV is the preferred screen, and this John Doe’s
- do not want to be tangled in cables linking the TV and the PC.
- do not have enough time to burn a DVD on the PC and then to read it on the DVD player connected to the TV
Naturally, one assume here the movies received on the PC from the Internet are encoded with a quality level allowing to comfortably watch them on a 42″ screen, not speaking of miserable 480×360px Youtube video…
It should be Microsoft’s responsibility to create an easy way to connect the PC and TV, and they should have done it around 1999.
But no, Microsoft wanted to “own” the TV instead through the XBox. Directly connecting a PC and TV has always been so difficult that it seems it’s made on purpose in order to sell XBoxes.
The fact that they went on to lose $5 billion (and counting) on the XBox just serves them right.
Great stuff,I can imagine plugging one of these in loaded up with a presentation would be much nicer than dragging around a computer.
Hey! What’s wrong with this? We at Microsoft helped them “design” this system. The other 20 pieces are not shown but are readily assembled in under 3 hours. The walking arround the room is good for your health.
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Phillips sells a DVD place with a USB interface. You can put movies on a USB stick or any drive that USE inferace(uses FAT so it needs to be formated under 20GB). The Player sells for $60. And since the player is already plugged in ti very easy to move movies
For the person that dotn want to move stuff. you MediaGate players that work great for under $100. The higher end ones sell for $250.
And The Xbox 360 is very good media extender. FOr the same price as the buffulo and other companies you get a much better extender, that can play games too.
Sorry this device is not only not worth it, it just dont even have the same functions as cheaper devices.
This is exactly why I left the company, it stopped innovating. The people in charge are not thinking outside the box. This is just another typical example of bureaucracy stifling innovation of employees.
They failed to catch up with Apple Ipod, they did not listen and did not go the WiFi direction and now ITouch and IPhone is going to kill their Sansa marketshare. Yet again they make the same mistakes by introducing a piece of hardware ( i wanted to use crap but decided not to ) with yesterday’s technology.
See, there you go. That is funny!!
so I just put my old pc in a cabinet in the living room and hooked it up to the composite in my tv, and stuck a wireless nic. then I remote in with my laptop via tight vns and bob’’s yer uncle…
I use it for home movies and photos etc… works like a charm…
This is nothing new….just copying your downloads to a usb drive and playing it on your tv.
Besides…the next wave in internet tv may not ride on hardware based solutions..which have a very high time-to-market but by innovate delivery mechanisms based on p2p networks…
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Custom Social Networks
Don – yeah, me too – I have most of that all worked out. Have a sample box here in my office – just need a bit of capital to make it a go.
But manual transportation is the only thing that will work reliably thus far for the non-techies. If people can operate a point and shoot digicam, than they can operate this. Same concept! Streaming video over the typical 802.11G network is a terrible experience. Until 802.11N takes hold, this is the way to go.
Netgear EVA8000 does a much better job and you do not need to go back to your PC to record another content …. just stream it using wifi
What’s the deal? I’ve got my PC in one room hooked into my TV in the other room (svideo cable, audio cable), I clone the computer screen, and I can watch whatever I’ve got on the hard drive. And I control everything from the couch with a remote.
Now I can see the need for a “media center” server integrated with a television/amplifier etc. for the living room which wouldn’t require any special configurations, but I’m happy with the setup I have.
It will be interesting to think of a box with P2P enhanced live streaming and VOD system inside, maybe intel inside too, but it must be cheap and easy enouph.
The cable system will go along the way of HDTV, while PC based video could use TV set for live and VOD streaming sometime. People in US could watch Noregian TV by a system named EUchannels.net, streaming from Oslo, with quality good enough on a 25″ flat TV, instead of from a samll 14″ notebook screen.
Hello from Neuros-
The solution does not look very attractive, but the price is. If Sandisk is targeting the less tech-savvy consumers, it is not a bad idea, but something that works like a fancy card reader looks like a stretch compared to what is out there. Not having at least a networking option is really a big limitation.
Ray is right, if you want a good media extender, the Xbox is a better choice. If you want to play videos only , the D-link series does not get raving grades from users, but it still looks more attractive than the Take TV. The Apple TV is OK but is stuck to play iTunes content. If you want to record content and have access and play network shares (content in the MPEG 4 format), take a look at the Neuros OSD.
The average computer to tv setup is way more complicated for a consumer than it needs to be. For example, I have an HP laptop with s-video and audio out with a big screen tv with s-video and composite audio. You wouldn’t believe the trouble I went through to create a custom cable to connect the laptop to the tv, it’s ridiculous. No wonder this technology has mostly stayed in the showroom.
“As the photo above demonstrates, SanDisk has a rather liberal view of the word simplify.”
Hahahaha. Thanks, Duncan!
Useless.
Hmmm…Since I can’t just connect an S-Video cable?
There is a big market of late adapters who will find this device a valid alternative to burning DVDs.
And yet, such a device will probably vanish quicker than expected.
A comment to ex-Sandisk:
Bah! – Your bitter and vindictive tone makes me wonder if SanDisk are better off with out you.
Use a 4GB media card, Upload media files onto it, Place it in the DVD player that has a memory card reader and watch from there.
Why spend $100 for an useless device.
A better investment would be to buy a 4GB card for $30 and a DVD player that has a media card reader and also upconverts DVD signal for HDTV for $50 (eventuall most of us would change our DVD players to the one that upconverts). Sell current dvd player and your smaller SD card if you have one.
Also, can reuse 4GB media card with a digital camera.
Don’t get it !!
Thanks for very interesting article. I really enjoyed reading all of your posts.
It’s interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else’s
point of view… makes you think more. So please keep up the great work.
Greetings from http://nocuj.com.pl
Not sure how you can Apple TV is a poor example of a device that gets music/video content to the living room entertainment center. I have one and it works brilliantly. I’ve purchased many devices over the past 5 years to do this very thing and they have all fallen short: Gateway Connected DVD player (powered by D5), set top boxes from HP and Sonic Blue, gear from Sony. Apple TV was a breeze to set up and my 4 year old uses it to playback kids shows we purchase from iTunes. Works great.
WhereverTV (www.wherever.tv) has both a free, web-version for people who don’t want to watch this content on a TV, as well as a portable device (no PC required) that connects to a TV and is truly “simple to use”.
I’d rather get a real media box, like the Mvix 760HD.
I have been using a pre-production prototype of this product for the past few months, and i have to say that it has made viewing a much easier process in general. for all of you crying about this “not so simple” device, it requires no more effort than transferring data to a usb stick. if you are talented and skilled enough to work out how to download a movie file, then this should not be too challenging for you…
What is the make and model of the DVD player(s) that can play video files (or multimedia?) from a USB thumb drive?
I’ve tried the Apple TV, an iPod dock for my TV, and the Dlink media player. I think that the TakeTV concept will be very popular for these reasons:
1. Folks want content on their TV from other sources than iTunes
2. Network-based solutions incur video sputtering – a local disk is needed
3. Oncreen display and remote control are critical for 10 foot living room viewing
They still need to support more video formats and they should integrate the Miro RSS reader into their FanFare client so that they can really take on iTunes head-on.
I also think that TrustedFlash might be the right way to do DRM – when needed – do note that TakeTV does not require DRM for files but it may enable Showtime to distribute their great shows via FanFare.
… more here: http://podslug.com/blog/?p=111
Erik
I’ve seen more soultions on website: http://www.plugpctotv.com . They have good pricess too…
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Wow that just seems very complicated…
Why dont you just use a satellite tv for pc software program?
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