Pinnacle Systems - Product summary - ShowCenter
The Pinnacle ShowCenter is a new entry into the network media devices arena. It looks like a bit of a hybrid system, with a $299 silver box that goes into your home theater setup, acting as a wired/wireless gateway point to your PC's library.
It does music, movies, and images with the added twist of including music and movie ripping into the package. There aren't any thorny piracy questions with this device, as they encourage you to encode your CD and DVD collection for playback from your computer. It's nice to see fair uses of copyright figure largely into a new device, as this is essentially a $300 super CD and DVD changer than can hold as many albums and movies as you have hard drive space for.
Where does it say they include movie ripping? I know Pinnacle sells DVD back-up software (which I believe is still subject to a lawsuit ). If it's the same software or features the same capabilities, then that would be a pretty good deal.
Then I'd just need to figure out some way to cost-effectively put together a 2+ terabyte media server, and I could finally realize my dream of getting all my DVDs off all those shiny discs and away from all that annoying CSS and Macrovision nonsense.
Posted by: Will Raleigh | November 18, 2003 at 02:24 PM
This was discussed on AVS Forum. IIRC the consensus was that if you want a hard-disk-based DVD jukebox your only choices are Kaleidescape or a homebuilt HTPC. Devices like the ShowCenter might be able to play MPEG-2 files, but they don't do DVD menus.
Posted by: Wes Felter | November 19, 2003 at 08:31 PM
FYI: There's a linux/MacOSX/*nix available for the Showcenter :-)
Posted by: Carsten Bartels | December 18, 2003 at 10:36 AM