Thursday, October 9, 2008
Velocity Micro Announces the FUZEbox
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 01:45 PM
"Velocity Micro introduces the Velocity FuzeBox, the world's first whole home media experience. Take control of your entire media collection-movies, video, music, and pictures-like never before with the FuzeBox intuitive user interface. Then distribute content throughout your home to turn your entire house into a virtual media hub...Catalogue, store, and organize your entire library of movies, TV, music, and pictures on the FuzeBox's massive hard drive. Then access them quickly and easily using the revolutionary and intuitive FuzeBox interface for an immersive entertainment experience."
Velocity Micro has released something new here, and I'm trying to wrap my brain around exactly what it is. In the demo video, I see Windows Media Center, but elsewhere the UI looks quite different - it looks like it's Windows Vista Home Premium-based system where the Media Center UI is front and centre, with some custom software bits thrown in. It's got built-in cable-card support (two in the FUZEbox, four in the FUZEbox Pro), so you can get HD goodness captured to the hard drive. The FAQ has lots of good info - like the fact that this system will not rip DVDs for you, but if it detects an unencrypted movie format on the hard drive, it will pull down cover art and DVD info on it. So there's no breaking the DMCA here - move along MPAA agents. The pricing seems fairly reasonable - it starts at $1995 USD, and that's with 4 GB of RAM, an unspecified Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, and 750 GB of storage space. For $249 more you can jump up to two 1 TB hard drives - nice!
If my local cable company (Shaw) offered cable card support, I might be all over this...but as it stands now, I can only hope that someday I'll be able to indulge in the HD TV goodness (my sucktastic Motorola HD PVR doesn't really count because it's a closed system). The full press release is after the break. Read more...
