A quick peek at HP’s linux media hub

I had noted the announcement of this box last week, but now you can actually get a closer look…

eHomeUpgrade points to a video from CES with HP showing off their soon to be released linux based media hub. It’s quite nice and includes 2 HDTV Tuners, a DVD reader and burner (including the capability to burn an image on the disc), access to music and video content, photos… basically the works. There’s also a removable hard drive bay like the HP Windows Media Centers and front ports for media cards from your various devices.

There’s no word on price, or whether it will actually be out this fall, rather than officially announced and available for the holidays. It definitely looks very good – minus the ever present HP logo however – That’s going to get old very quickly.

The main issue / question I have is how HP figures we’ll be able to record HD on this… Where are the 2 sources going to come from? In the current model, you need a cable box to deliver the signal and you can’t control the 2 tuners externally. Cable Card is an option, but it’s pretty early still for that and you then sacrifice additional capabilities from your cable company like on-demand programming since cable cards are still just a one way technology.

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