Fully featured HTPC & NAS combination

[mjw]

Over time we see more and more convergence in terms of products for example NAS's getting streaming capabilities. The problem at the moment is that there are some devices that are great at streaming (e.g. Roku), and devices that are good NASes (Readynas) but there isn't really anything out there yet that can do both really well other than a fully fledged PC. HTPC's don't make good NASes because they don't house RAID arrays.

I think it would be very enticing if Netgear could produce a product which had the power and capabilities (including HDMI 1.4a output) of the ASRock's High-End Vision 3D HTPC together with the exisiting NAS capability:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3954/asro ... c-reviewed

and preferably use a Sandybridge CPU for real-time transcoding:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3922/inte ... -exposed/6

saw a demo where Intel took a ~3 minute 1080p 30Mbps source video and transcoded it to a 640 x 360 iPhone video format. The total process took 14 seconds and completed at a rate of roughly 400 frames per second.

This way we would be using the same hardware for two purposes but only paying for it once (rather than buying a separate NAS and a separate streamer). Also since the media files would be stored inside the streaming device, there would be no issues with the bandwidth and reliability of the network between the NAS and the streamer. In addition it becomes possible to justify a better CPU for using in the device (than if you were buying two separate devices each requiring CPU, disk, memory, motherboard) which should make the NAS functions (such as Frontview) perform better than they do with a low-end processor like the Atom.