Wetlook World Forum

Anyway...he has been filling me in on all the latest new "gadgets" on display. Bill Gates and Michael Dell just gave their keynote speeches this week on all their new innovations the public will soon get to see.

The "hot topic" of debate at the CES trade show this week is really a legal issue. That device you mention is just the tip of the iceberg. The biggest change coming now is the new range of PVRs coming out (ie. Personal Video Recorders, Digital Video Recorders...commonly called TIVOs in the USA). In the past...DVRs were "self contained" devices that merely let you store tv programming from satellite or cable tv to your PVR or DVR...but it was not "transportable". However..the new range of PVR or DVR devices now offer complete portabability, so you can capture anything you want from satellite, cable or digital tv...and then move that via firewire transfer to a portable  digital video player device such as the one you mentioned...or...to video player for your car.

The debate though is....not about how and when this can happen...cos those devices are already here....but the real issue is whether the tv programmers and movie industry are going to LET you do this. Cos...the copyright laws in the USA still permit "fair use"...which they deem ok to save tv programs to your TIVO or DVR or PVR....but to then move that data to portable video players or car video players via downlinking from your tivo to your portable video player...opens up a whole can of worms....that the movie and tv industry might not be too thrilled about.

FYI...my wife wanted a portable hard drive player for Xmas...so I bought her the Dell DJ40 (with 40gig internal drive)..that is only slightly bigger than the size of a pager,,,and that can store up to 5000 songs in mp3 format...much nicer than a portable cd player. Apple have just displayed their new "I-pod" at the trade show this week...and when it comes out later this year...that thing is only the size of a credit card and has an internal hard drive that can store 1000 mp3's on it.

My wife's Dell DJ can also store 40gigs of mpeg video files as datafiles too...so it can be used as data storage device...only it cannot play video..it can only play audio files at this time. If you store other data files on it...you need to offload to to a pc or laptop to play other file formats.....but I am sure the next generation of Dell players will have video as well as audio playback.

None of this is really the issue for me. The fact that hard drives are getting bigger in capacity and smaller and more portable is fine...but thats not really what I am waiting for. We still need more breakthrus as far as video compression technology goes...i.e. higher bit rate quality....at significantly smaller file sizes....coupled with broadband speeds being 4-5 times faster than they are right now. E.G. my cable company just doubled the speed of our downloads from 1.5 megabits...to 3.3 megabits (to outdo DSL...which is mostly a 1.5 megabit service in our area). And thats nice....but for me to offer an entire 90 minute video online...is still going to be a 1 gigabyte file....so we still neeed a new hybrid mpeg format to be created that is better than divx is. When we can crunch an entire movie down to only 100 megs...or...broadband services exceed 10 megabits....then we are in business. But for now...we still have a ways to go.

mk