The more users on the net or at the house, the slimmer the bandwidth available to use for watching movies. I hate being at the mercy of someone else for my own enjoyment. I always get the max enjoyment from my OPPO and a Bluray or DVD.

Again, it is the Quality of Experience camp vs The Convenience camp. I recall looking at big LP collections with great respect and admiration. The same holds true now to an impressive disc collection (although not quite the same). That is part off the experience. I look at a hard drive and think, "meh" could be 10 could be 10,000, who cares. Cold, sterile, and very unappealing. As Gonk pointed out the death of disc media is not as close as many here tend to predict. It will be around for those who know better.

I guess I did interpret properly what some thought was Gonk's last post from March 21st. Glad to see you're still around Gonk.

I've yet have to convert my CD collection to FLAC, which I've been meaning to do for a while. Since it takes a lot of time to do this operation, I intend to use a NAS that will replicate to a second NAS unit for fault tolerance purposes.

However, I also have some cherished DVD-Audio and SACD discs. The SACD layers from SACDs are extremely problematic to rip. You need a 1st or 2nd generation PS3 as those play SACD and there's some software on Linux that's supposed to get the job done but I think the DSD streams have to get converted to PCM if I'm not mistaken. DVD-Audio can be now be ripped with "DVD Audio Extractor". When it comes to multichannel playback of DVD-Audio and SACD stored of hard drives, I haven't seen too many elegant solutions and I'd rather not use a HTPC anywhere near my audio gear. So I may have to continue using my Oppo BDP-83 for that.

As for video, when you begin to have like over 100 Blu-ray titles, that takes an awful lot of disc space (about 5TB) for some movies you may get to watch every few other years. Then there are the DVD titles I won't re-buy on BD. For the video side, I personally don't thing that the time and hard disk expense is worth it.

I agree for the CDs Ritz. When it come to Blu-ray material though, having gotten used to the HD lossless audio codecs (Dolby TrueHD & DTS Master Audio), I just couldn't live with the legacy DTS and Dolby Digital soundtracks anymore. And then there's the cost associated with the space requirements for a large video collection (see my previous post).

The 4 year mark since the announcement of the 997 is 9/19/12. Released before or after?

I'm going with before.

Anyone else?

After but not much.

I'd like it next week honestly, but I expect it will be after the 4 year mark.

I'll say a bit before. Hey, we haven't established the buy-in for this pot

While I too have been "plagued" by some of the same 'work related issues' as gonk relates I did manage to get some of my HT gear 'upgraded' recently. I now have a shiny new DirecTV HR-34 HMC in the mix. I was delighted to have a "enthusiast" type installer and managed to chat with him about what he has seen in various subscribers set-ups. I think this is relevant for both the discussion of the "death of physical media" AND the "release date" issues that come up for HT gear.

First I have to confess that I am NOT an early adopter type enthusiast. When being "first on your block" to have new equipment means that you have an angry spouse that can't watch the shows they want, cranky off-spring that are not keen to see their pop running diagnostics on what they perceive as an "appliance" and frustrating calls to CSRs that are not as competent as the staff I deal with at work it really ruins the whole experience.

I can totally understand why LARGE numbers of households prefer to stick with relatively BASIC players for DVD and are slowly realizing that BluRay is perhaps a feasible "upgrade/replacement path" -- according to the installer the majority of homes STILL have DVD units and significant number have them RIGHT ALONGSIDE their BluRay players... As others have alluded to, the experience of having physical media is something that is EASY for people to understand. I also agree that a COLLECTION of discs holds appeal to a WIDE range of people and is unlikely to go away anytime soon UNLESS the various "tricks" that have proven compelling about music downloads through firms like Apple are applied by the makers of videographic content, something that largely seems impossible given the backward looking legalistic stance that permeates ...

The hardware front is really much less complicated. The DirecTV HMC was a long anticipated device. It offers features well beyond other DVRs and was developed by D* while they were simultaneously working with TiVo to offer a device that incorporated the menu, search and intelligent viewing habits capabilities that TiVo has patents on (and has won judgements against others for infringment). The delays in the D* TiVo far exceed anything that Outlaw has encountered and reflect a host of changes to the basic architecture of how D* choose to incorporate connectivity, on demand and whole-home features. There was / is also the backdrop of D* not really WANTING TiVo to succeed -- perhaps how the firm that made the Sherwood-Newcastle products had issues helping Outlaw deliver a super premium product...
The result of this chaos in the D* world is that, to the chagrin on many aficionados, the TiVo unit is NOT as capable as the HMC, and now (as reported by my installer) most of the HMCs are going to HT enthusiasts and the HD TiVos are mostly going to folks whose younger relatives are worried that any changes in the menus will result in too much "familial tech support"...

I really don't think there is much chance of Outlaw leaving too many enthusiasts behind by the gap in connected "features" that has grown between products from Integra or similar firms and the 978. I largely believe that so long as the 978 is delivered in a bug free state and has excellent SQ at a terrific value point there will be more than enough folks willing to come home and just listen to whatever sources they enjoy...

How about free posts for a year.