DUELING BANJOS
Duel deck DVD/DVR goes modular

Gizmodo has a cool blurb about a DVD/DVR which allows users to SWAP OUT the hard drive on the fly in favor of larger capacities.

This is cool as it may force TIVO and REPLAY TV (which currently is networkable) to follow suit. Currently, DVR users have to hack into their DVR boxes and void their warranty in order to beef up or add an additional hard drive.

The NorthQ NQ7100 DVD Player/Harddrive can accomplish DVD - Harddisk recording in up to ten Media formats (DVD, Audio, CD-R, CD-RW, VCD2, VCD3, SVCD, CVD, MP3 & Kodak picture CD), perform "timeshifting" to record MPEG 2 in 4 different quality modes (XP - SP - LP & EP) off it's built in TV Tuner, copy from DVD to hard drive, and record of other devices with SVideo imput.

The audio portion is rather state of the art as well with Dolby AC-3 decoding & Digital Output, as well as DTS Digital Sound.

What's the catch? They sell it WITHOUT the hard drive. But that isn't too bad as as users can add as much hard drive space as they can afford.