Toshiba aims for living room domination with StorE TV media set-top box
By Darren Murph 
posted February 10th 2010 9:14PM
posted February 10th 2010 9:14PM
posted February 10th 2010 9:14PM
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Jeez, yet another STB. Yawn!
@aubreyq
You're right, having choices is a bad thing.
@aubreyq I want my choices of how I get information to be decided by one major corporation, boo competition :)
I'm not against competition, but to be honest, there is a lot of crappy interfaces on a lot of these media streamers. Take a trip to the AVS forums, where you have users sharing their frustrations on each and every one of these media front ends. Most of them fail on the experience factor, such as having a hard time drilling through a content folder. So far, WDTV seems to be doing well. It may not have all the codec support XBMC has, but people seem generally happy with it and there is a community behind it. Popcorn Hour seems to have its share of fans as well.
Take a second look at that shitty, embarrassing excuse of menu navigation on the LED display of that Toshiba unit. How is anyone supposed to be excited over such a thing?
Toshiba, please! Don't jump in this game if you can't even take an UI seriously.
That's one good lookin box.
@(Unverified) Agreed, but that's one horrible looking UI. Path names & lots of extra slashes? HDD on the screen in two places? "/../" for up directory?
@morcheeba Thank you, morcheeba. Well said.
@(Unverified)
UI
@morcheeba It also has a UI for the screen it is connected to which looks much more intuitive.
It's funny how increasingly, major electronics manufacturers are making set-top boxes that, in essence, benefit from the torrenting of HD video. 1.5 TB of 1080p content from ... where?
@cobaltage
> It's funny how increasingly, major electronics manufacturers are
> making set-top boxes that, in essence, benefit from the torrenting of
> HD video. 1.5 TB of 1080p content from ... where?
Here's a novel idea: buy it. Take the money you would give to Comcast and give it to Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart or the Movie Trading company instead. At 25G a pop, it's pretty easy to fill a terabyte hard drive. Even with SD content, it's pretty easy to fill up multiple multi-terabyte hard drives over time.
No kick-me sign required.
You can also fill 1.5TB pretty quickly with cable and broadcast recordings. They can be just as bulky as BluRay disks.
@cobaltage
No torrents and no pron ... I'm at 6TB worth of movies and music. 1.5TB's is nothing, especially if you rip your Blu Rays to disk.
1.5 TB of living room domination?
@jedi
Yes you can rip your own BluRay discs... but I'm pretty sure that that is still technically illegal, which is what I assume cobaltage was referring too. Media companies have given us very few methods to legally store digital content (especially HD).
@greenskye That is what I had in mind: 1080p video from official sources is more or less locked down in one way or another. I don't begrudge someone backing up DVDs or BR discs (or certainly music files) for personal usage, of course.
@greenskye
That will be an interesting "prosecution".
Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, we intend to show that the defendant did willfully and maliciously go about buying 1500 DVDs from Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart and then did with intent and malice of forethought dared to use those purchased disks in a manner of his choosing.
Boring XBMC or boxee will be far more capable and cheaper. Also why so much storage in the box? I would much rather stream from NAS or a computer then I choose exactly what I want.
WD is still the champ (shout out to PCH) for the budget conscience. And for those that spend a little more you get a full blown PC running W7MC.
These STB's are almost always priced at the cost of getting a dedicated W7MC machine and contain only a fraction of the usability. Throw in proprietary crap and these things will never make a huge dent in the home theater market.
They are really only useful to people to who have more money then sense and want a simple solution that looks nice.
Oh, if only we could get a FIOS-compatible STB with this much power...
haha they made a reference to WALL-E
>>Jeez, yet another STB. Yawn!
I thought they had medicines for that...
It's very pretty, but they need the XMB style interface.
Obviously not THE xmb style interface, but something like that.
On the TV. I'm sure this thing turns off that bright menu when you watch the film. While this box is sexy enough to sell very well, it's all about how well it organizes your files.
It's just another thing your 360 or PS3 or computer can already do, though.
The User Interface (UI) and the ability to play nice with other devices is the key.
I would like to see how well this plays with the digital cable box or satellite receiver box.
Is this why they dropped their plans for a WMC Extender?
All for competition, but too bad everyone couldn't agree on a common platform.
Throw in a couple of TV tuners, Free TV Guide, DVR software and don't make it too expensive and I'm sold!!! :-)
I'd like a list of the exact specs of this. What video formats/containers are supported? What audio formats are supported? Does it bit-stream DTS-HD and TrueHD?
I'd like a list of the exact specs of this. What video formats/containers are supported? What audio formats are supported? Does it bit-stream DTS-HD and TrueHD?