Multimedia Hard Drives to Replace Traditional VCRs

Home entertainment is one of the fields that received a massive amount of innovation lately going from traditional TV sets to big plasma or LCD displays and multimedia intended and dedicated computers. Emtec now announced the launch of a new home entertainment product, the Movie Cube -R, which is at its core a hard disk drive with extended video-in and video-out ports and multimedia functions.

The Movie Cube -R is a portable device and it can store, record and playback videos encoded with the MPEG 4 and AVI standards without the need of a computer or other appliance. Apart from videos the Emtec product offers extended support for images and photos, JPG, JPEG, BMP, and audio clips encoded using one of the popular formats MP3, WMA and OGG. The most important part of the Movie Cube -R device is the integrated hard disk drive, a high quality product made by Hitachi, which comes with several storage capacities like 160GB and 500GB. Because of the integrated video-in port, the Emtec multimedia hard disk drive is capable of recording all kinds of TV channels without the need of a computer system or traditional VCR, while the presence of the built-in video-out port means that playing back the stored files is done directly to a TV set, again without other intermediate devices.

As the Emtec Movie Cube -R is small and it features a smart design and light weight, it is also an extremely portable multimedia solution that is aimed at completely replacing other recording and playback devices. Its functionality can be easily expanded as it comes with an integrated high speed USB port as well as a card reader that supports the most popular formats in use today. Backward compatibility with the older USB version 1.0 and 1.1 is also assured as is the compatibility with the most popular operating systems like Microsoft's Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista and Apple's Mac OS.

The Emtec Movie Cube -R comes packed with all necessary cable and accessories like remote control, AC/DC adapter, A/V output cable, USB cable, user manual and A/V recording cable. As all the multimedia files are stored locally, on the Hitachi hard disk drive, the new multimedia appliance lets users enjoy their favorite TV shows and movies without the need of separate CD or DVD discs, while also ensuring that multimedia content can be easily recorded for later visualization.