For those of us who don't want to wait for Amazon to lower their price, I figured that I'd buy it now for virtually the same price AR. I don't mind rebates either. I'm used to them by now being a veteran of Hot Deals on AT. I even remember when Rossman was just cutting his teeth here. Now look at him with his own deals site. 😉
As far as having a server instead of burning a cd or dvd. Hey.. If that's what you want to do, more power to you. I could do that without having a server. I've got plenty of hdd space and I have all my pc's networked. I just don't want to sit at my pc to watch tv shows. I spend enough time at the pc for work and various other things. I'd rather plop myself in front of the tv, relax and watch a show.
I downloaded a show in HDTV Divx format last night and it took about a minute to burn it to a cd in regular data format. I stuck it in the Philips unit and it was better than watching it with my dvr. Someone had already removed all the commercials for me, so I didn't have to do anything, but watch it. With my old dvd player, I had to convert it to dvd format and it takes forever. I can't just burn a cd or dvd on a whim and watch it. It takes some planning. Plus, the process to convert the file drags my system down while it's doing the conversion.
As far as having HDMI, I don't need it when I'm dealing with Divx files. Divx is a compressed format and it's a blessing not to be so resolute with these files. If I had HDMI, I'd highlight any pixelation. If I want to watch a regular uncompressed movie on a dvd player that's hooked up via HDMI, I can just watch it on my reference dvd player. For tv shows on Divx, this player works just fine.
Sal
