Killing two birds with one stone. Saw two interesting home DVRs, kind of media-center-ish, with some cool features.

DigitalDeck is a push/pull media system. Let me explain. You have a central server and little satellite servers, all of which hook up to just about any media device imaginable, from DVD players to FM receivers to MP3 players. Each satellite has audio and video in, so if you have cable in the bedroom and want to watch it in the basement, you can activate the thing remotely. It also supports shared audio and video over the wired network.

The MediaReady 5000 is a prettied-up Linux box that supports audio and video shares through Windows and OS X and includes a DVR, scheduler, photo viewer, and even a web browser (Firefox) and email client (Thunderbird). They've done a good job of making it nice and user friendly and it even includes a keyboard with scroll wheel a la WebTV.

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