The US company of I-O DATA has just announced the release of a new LinkPlayer in the USA and Canada, with the catchy easy-to-remember type number AVLP2/DVDLA. The first shipment of LinkPlayer will be in the middle of November in the US and the Manufacturer's Suggested Retatil Price SRP will be US$249.00.
Why is this device interesting? It isn't the Blu-Ray HD DVD player just yet, but this LinkPlayer allows you to link your PC to the TV through a wireless LAN and playback various formatted files connect from any PCs on the home network to a Big screen TV with a remote control. It will playback the new High Definition format starting to appear on some DVDs in the US that employ a new codec from Windows Media.
In additional, your digital camera and USB memory can be connected directly through a USB 2.0/1.1 port to display files on a large screen TV. This device is only for the North American market for the moment - but I can see some interesting experiments on the horizon in Europe.
You can watch a normal DVD movie playback on TV, but also view the same digital content inside a PC via LAN. Also this is a newer 2nd model, which supports not only DivX/MPEG but also Microsoft Windows Media® Video (WMV9.
This new player supports HDTV, meaning a picture of 1280 by 720. However, note that you need a 3 GHz computer to get the top-quality HD versions running properly with 5:1 surround sound. My "old" 2.8 GHz machine struggles.
This is very cool, but it doesn't record TV. If it had that, I'd probably buy one.
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