We come home and see a subtle light in a prominent place. This is the modern equivalent of the "message waiting" light, a.k.a AOL's "You've got Mail!".
Sherrill walks over to the TV and turns it on with the "Status" button on the DDCB remote control.
She sees that there are 3 new voice mails, 2 new emails for her and that DDCB has recorded 1 new television show to watch at her convenience.
She listens to the voice mails and decides that one of them should be for me, so she sends it to me. It will show up in my email inbox. She scans the subjects of her email and determines that there's nothing she wants to read right now (she'll probably read them later from her computer -- the higher resolution screen is better for text).
We have been to the zoo with the kids, so we pull the media out of the digital camera and stick it in the slot on DDCB. DDCB asks if we want to move or copy the pictures. We decide to move them. DDCB automatically moves the pictures from the card to our storage server -- we can view them from the TV, but we'll probably do it later from the computer. Had we gone nuts and taken video as well we could do the same with it.
For now we decide on a little music while making dinner, so we have it play a random selection of tracks from the pool we've decided is good working music. Later we'll watch a video by pulling up an on-screen list of all of our videos and selecting one to view. There will be no media to change -- DDCB takes care of all this for us.
Why is this an interesting project? Because it involves tradeoffs between hardware and software, integration of pieces that haven't yet been integrated and creation of some software that doesn't exist. It's also an experiment in "what works" for computing as part of the home.
For example: Should I get a faster processor which takes more power but can handle MPEG4 and then figure out how to cool it? Or should I get a hardware MPEG2 encoder/decoder and put in a smaller box with a smaller, perhaps fanless power supply.
Are their commercial solutions? Kinda.
Fundamentally, I want to own my own data. I've read about Microsoft XP Media Center Edition but I don't think that's what I'm looking for, for several reasons:
If you're not technically savvy XP Media Center Edition might be for you.
OK, so how about commercial hardware solutions? There's the fun part: in this application the hardware depends on the software. If I use software that requires a P4 3.6GHz processor I'll either have to put up with a noisy fan or had better have a huge case in which I can cool it. If my software can use a dedicated MPEG en/decoder I can go with a slower (and lower power) processor. Perhaps with the right heat pipe cooling I can get away with no fan at all? That would be nice -- this is a box for the living room, and fans make noise. You want to listen to your tunes, not the drone of the fans.
(unfinished)