Sony's Digital Living System Combines Home Theater Functionality with the Brains of a PC

The new Sony's VAIO XL1 Digital Living System brings all of your entertainment into the living room and lets you manage it with a remote control.

Two sleek components comprise Sony's Digital Living System: a high-end multimedia PC and a 200-disc media changer/recorder. Both are designed to fit into a home entertainment rack and the elegant silver and black casings are sure to complement the rest of your home entertainment system. The PC connects to a television via an HDMI cable, the emerging standard for digital connectivity, to output high-definition video and multi-channel digital audio in a single connection.

Close collaboration with Microsoft and tight integration with the Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 operating system ensure unique functionality when using the XL1 system's disc changer. Discs inserted into the changer are automatically detected by the PC which downloads (over a wired or wireless network) available metadata on each one, including jewel case covers and artist information. For movies, an in-depth synopsis is also downloaded in addition to the star, director, producer details and more. All of this information is easily sorted and accessed using the included wireless keyboard or remote control.

"Sony has innovated once again by introducing a product that is a monumental step forward in defining the way consumers enjoy digital entertainment," said Mike Abary, vice president of VAIO product marketing for Sony Electronics in the U.S. "With the XL1, users can still manage all their meaningful entertainment content such as downloaded music, home movies and personal photos. But the really groundbreaking functionality is the additional ability to easily organize, sort, and access packaged content -- all of the DVD movies and audio CDs that have been traditionally relegated to a bookshelf."

"The Sony VAIO XL1 Digital Living System combines an innovative and cost-effective CD/DVD changer with a state-of-the-art Windows Media Center Edition PC, offering consumers a very cool, high-quality living room entertainment experience," said Joe Belfiore, general manager of the Windows eHome Division at Microsoft Corp. "The XL1 is a result of close collaboration between Sony and Microsoft, and our two companies will continue to work together on future products that extend the Windows Media Center platform."

Rip and Burn

With the XL1 Digital Living system, you can consolidate your music library by backing up your music CDs to your hard drive to be stored along with all of your downloaded music. With the touch of a few buttons, you can automatically and sequentially record up to 200 audio CDs from the media changer to the hard drive along with available album covers and track information. You can also record a series of television show episodes to the hard drive and easily transfer them to blank DVDs stored in the changer. The system alerts you to how many discs are needed and you can burn a whole season of your favorite TV program to DVDs to take on your next road trip.

In addition to being the ultimate home A/V entertainment center, the XL1 system is a powerful PC delivering robust performance for running multiple applications simultaneously. With its Intel Pentium D dual-core processor, ample DDR2 memory, PCI-E graphics and room for up to three SATA hard drives (RAID ready), the VAIO XL1 system is well-equipped to tackle your most demanding tasks. Internal PC components are liquid-cooled to ensure quiet operation worthy of a living room. Advancements such as Sony's Sound Reality technology boost audio performance for high-quality digital sound.

Web browsing has been especially designed for an engaging living room experience. With the touch of the remote, you can quickly expand your favorite web pages for comfortable reading from your couch.

The Digital Living System will be sold as a package and will be available next month for about $2,300 at national retailers, online at SonyStyle.com or at SonyStyle stores.

Source: Sony

Related stories:

Measuring the Footprint of Cells
Even the slightest differences are important in competitive sport: To improve a ski jumper's performance, the trainer can analyze the jump very accurately using force sensors. Researchers in Jena and Bremen are planning something similar. However, their work is not with athletes but with tiny somatic cells.
Asus Unveils New Mini PC with Full HD Support
Catering to users who require a compact and powerful home entertainment center, ASUS has unveiled the new ASUS Mini PC Nova Lite PX24. At only 2L in size, this world's smallest mini PC is equipped with a built-in independent graphics card to seamlessly combine high quality audio/visual experiences with a tiny footprint.
Researchers develop new image-recognition software
It takes surprisingly few pixels of information to be able to identify the subject of an image, a team led by an MIT researcher has found. The discovery could lead to great advances in the automated identification of online images and, ultimately, provide a basis for computers to see like humans do.
SUNY researcher issued patent for virtual telemicroscope
After nearly ten years of research and development, scientists at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and Peking University in Beijing were awarded a United States patent for their virtual telemicroscope. This patented software permits off-site pathologists to diagnose cancer or other diseases in patients living in remote locations around the world.
MIT aims to search for Earth-like planets with Google's help
MIT scientists are designing a satellite-based observatory that they say could for the first time provide a sensitive survey of the entire sky to search for planets outside the solar system that appear to cross in front of bright stars. The system could rapidly discover hundreds of planets similar to the Earth.
Keeping Traditions in a Modern-Day Bedouin Village
University of Arkansas researchers have used modern digital-mapping technology to uncover an ancient tradition still practiced by a Bedouin tribe that once roamed Jordan but now has settled into a modern village. The findings appear to have no parallel anywhere.
The digital home: An all-in-one device
Cable clutter and interface problems will soon be a thing of the past. In the living room of the future, all devices are connected wirelessly and can be easily operated via the television set. Fraunhofer researchers and their partners will be presenting the first solutions at CeBIT in Hanover (Germany) on March 4 through 9.
Swarm approach to photography
A new approach to cleaning up digital photos and other images has been developed by researchers in the UK and Jordan. The research, published recently in Inderscience's International Journal of Innovative Computing and Applications uses a computer algorithm known as a PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) to intelligently boost contrast and detail in an image without distorting the underlying features.

News discussion:

Electronic Devices news