Charlie,

You are correct about the MPEG4 encoding. But as to the media hub, I did not see any DVI connections, only S-video, composite and component connections. Also, can you play a computer game through it? If you look further through the manual, it is running Windows ME, 2000 or XP, so its still somewhat a PC.

And, since you're totally geeking it out, are you sure you wouldn't be better to go with a Sun Fire setup? That easily covers your Unix/Linux OS usage demand and you can just plop down a Sun Ray wherever you want in your house. Then, they have storage arrays that can easily handle 200-300 DVDs worth of storage without compression. True they're SCSI, but hell that's a thousand times better for RAID than SATA. SATA only came along to look like SCSI. Try a Sun StorEdge 9980 with a few 15,000 rpm drives to get your 1.6 TB and then up it from there to a total of 74.7 TB.

Now, for the average Joe, who isn't a computer geek, but enjoys high quality audio and video, they can go with the Media PC.

But, Gonk, seriously, how many people out there have 275 - 300 DVDs? Maybe 100 on average for a semi-movie aficionado, and with them being simple 480p format 6 GB maybe pushing it, but I'll give it to you, for some discs contain both wide screen and full screen formats on them. But even so, that's a requirement of 600 GBs on average, leaving 400 GBs of space out of the 1 TB.

Now, a WAV, zero loss, format consumes, on a less than normal average, 650 MB, or roughly 615 CDs worth of space in that 400 GB available space. (Note: Most of the old music is actually uses around 450 MB of a CD as the lengths of albums were often shorter than they are today.) But seriously, I can see 200-300 CDs being the number of discs in a semi-music aficionado’s realistic statistics. So that would actually require 200 GBs of space, erring on the safe side (it's only 195 GBs with the 650 MB average, still leaving 200 GB's for recording.

Now this is without using any compression, when we throw compression into the mix, that only benefits us more, giving us greater storage space in the 1 TB array. Now, are you telling me that 2 500 GB HDs can’t be afforded easily and still allow future expansion if needed? That’s using RAID 0 configuration. That should not loose you any space of the full 1 TB. Now they could go 4 250GB HDs for even less investment and implement a RAID 5, 6, or 7 at a lower cost and more reliable, so you don’t have to worry about re-ripping everything if a drive fails, as you said. Then just throw in a extra 250GB to handle that loss.

So you may be a little wrong in your dismissal of storage availability per price. And, Charlie, who doesn’t want to see their favorite porno site on a 80” screen, so web surfing availability is a must? Just Kidding about the porno!