"Roderick Stewart" wrote in message
.. .
In article , Ivan wrote:
Flash memory devices are steadily increasing in capacity whilst the price
has dropped dramatically (SD cards now up to 8 GB) However I do have to
admit not being up to speed on these kind of developments, so I'd like to
ask the more knowledgeable on this group 'is there any major technical
reason why some kind of memory card can't became a De Facto
interchangeable
standard on millions of PVR's around the world, maybe coupled with
MPEG4?.
especially as it's almost certain that not only will memory capacity
continue to improve but prices will also plummet.

SD already is a sort of de facto standard for storing material on all
sorts of
gadgets, mostly pocket ones, though I suspect it is used a lot less
frequently
for exchange of data between gadgets, because mostly people just want to
swap
the occasional snapshot, and they can use bluetooth or MMS for that. For
swapping stuff between computers, the USB dongle drive seems pretty
popular.
Whatever is cheapest and easiest to use will always be the one most people
use, and in five years time there will be something completely different,
and
Sony will invent their own incompatible version of the same thing, then a
smaller one that needs an adaptor, and so on.

So Rod it would appear that apart from cost technically there is absolutely
no reason why the SD card couldn't be king in the PVR world.

This evening I did a bit of experimentation, I converted an hour long TV
programme from my Humax (.TS files) to MPEG 2 and transferred them to a 2 GB
SD card, the total file size was 1.45 GB, and the results on my my 28" w/s
appeared to be equally as good as when played back from the original HD
(allowing for the fact that my Toshiba player only outputs composite video).

I know very little about MPEG 4 but I'm assuming that it's more efficient
than MPEG 2, so it follows that the file sizes would be smaller, can you
give me a rough idea by how much and would be resultant picture quality be
as good as with MPEG 2?

Cheers Ivan


Rod.