Here at CES this week, there’s been a lot of discussion around the future role of storage in the home. We’re all aware of the need for the growing need for storage thanks to the massive volumes of digital content that families are generating, and indeed downloading from a plethora of online media providers. The question is on what device should that content be held, and where should it be physically located in the home – a centralised home server or network storage device in the closet or desktop, or on the media receiver itself in the living room (Iomega’s new TV With Boxee, an example of the latter).
Certainly LG this week believe network storage can work in the Living Room – their all-new S1T1 home server brings consumer electronics-grade design to the storage world for the first time.
The first model in the new range is powered by a Marvell processor with 128MB RAM and includes a DVD Writer, a choice of 1TB or 2TB hard drives (single bay), Gigabit Ethernet and three USB 2.0 ports (1 x front, 2 x rear). As you’d expect for a living room device, the S1T1 includes iTunes, uPnP AV and DLNA media servers for streaming with onboard codec support for a range of file formats including TS/MP4/AVCHD/PS/MOV/AVI/MKV/M2V/VOB/FLV. Codec support includes MPEG-2 and H.264.
But you’ll have noticed that there’s no HDMI or video out on the S1T1, so no direct connection to the TV. This is 2011, remember? The new home server automatically transcodes and streams content to any networked PC, TV, Tablet or mobile handset in real-time. If you wish to set up multiple streams, a “pre-conversion” process can be set that converts a 120 minute HD video in around 60 mins, and SD video in just 30 minutes.
LG are releasing controller applications for Android and iOS devices at the end of January, which can be used to manage and configure the device and control your media streaming. File can be dragged and dropped on the mobile device to set up batch transcoding, and a media player feature can stream music, video and photos directly to the mobile device from the server.
The onboard DVD writer allows DVD movies to be transcoded on the fly from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 andstreamed directly to a mobile device or DLNA TV and a CD ripper application will copy tracks on inserted discs to the S1T1′s shared music folder. LG quote media streaming speeds in excess of 60 MB/sec across the network.
The server includes a PC backup application (Nero BackItUp) and the device is also fully Apple Time Machine compatible, so there’s a layer of protection available for your data on the network as well as strong media streaming support. Data stored on USB drives plugged into the server can also be automatically synced for backup. Finally the S1T1 can stream video directly from network or locally attached IP cameras to remote computers and mobile handsets.
With just 30W power consumption and 26dB (target) noise output, LG’s new home server looks like a great solution for the living room, especially for those homes with small to medium media collections. It’s due to ship in Q1 this year in major markets, and the company told me to stay tuned for a Blu-ray version of the product later in the year. Pricing should be around the $249 mark.
