Finally, somebody gets the home entertainment hub right. At Demo 2004 yesterday I saw the Molino, which is basically a big hard disk connected to a DVD drive and some memory card readers. It records CDs, DVD, and memory cards from your digital camera onto its hard disk, for playback on your TV and stereo.
Interestingly, it doesn't "rip" data from discs, it records it bit-for-bit, so DVDs and music play back just like you have the original disc in the drive. This eats up hard disk space something fierce, so it's good that the company will offer a terabyte drive in its high-end version.
Prices are too high ($995 for the basic unit with a 300G drive, $2995 for the 1T version), but they should drop.
On the other hand, compare it to Kaleidescape, which is $30,000!
Competition in this market will be fierce and I really doubt Molino will be the product your brother-in-law will get at Best Buy in five years. But it is a cool look at the future of home entertainment devices.
