OTHER TECH

Sony Vaio Digital Living System

Once a Media Center PC is loaded with music, photos, and home videos you've transferred from other media or downloaded from the Web, it becomes a grand repository of quickly accessible content. But the ubiquitous DVD continues to resist this trend toward ultimate convenience. Given the murky legal issues around copying a DVD to a hard drive, we're for the most part still forced to rifle through a jillion jewel cases and insert one disc at a time to play our movies. DVD megachangers are a step in the right direction, of course, and companies like Escient, ReQuest, and Control 4 (see review) sell systems that control an external Sony DVD megachanger through an onscreen user interface.

Sony has gotten into the act with its Vaio VGX-XL1 Digital Living System ($2,300), which marries a sleek black-and-silver Media Center PC with a matching 200-disc DVD changer. So along with indexing and accessing a massive movie collection at the push of a button, the Sony system has all the capabilities of a full-fledged Media Center for managing your other home-entertainment resources.

Sony Vaio

$2,300 • Dual-core 2.8-GHz Pentium; 512 MB RAM; 200-GB hard drive • 200-disc changer for bulk ripping CDs, recording DVDs, and managing DVD library • Analog TV tuner for recording • Free TV program guide • A/V inputs analog RF/antenna; composite/S-video; optical digital audio; microphone • A/V outputs HDMI; DVI; component video; optical and coaxial digital audio; headphone • Other I/O Ethernet; Wi-Fi antenna; 4 USB; 3 i.Link (two 6-pin, 4-pin); multicard reader; 2 IR emitters for cable/satellite control; wireless keyboard; remote control • 17 x 14 x 19.5 in, 75 lbs sony.com/vaio, 877-865-7669

The megachanger is what sets the system apart, and it does some neat tricks. Before stuffing it with DVDs, for example, you can use it to copy your CD collection wholesale to the PC's hard drive. I inserted a dozen or so discs at once, and the XL1 scanned each one and retrieved its cover art and track titles from the Internet at a rate of one every 30 seconds. Then I opted to let them all rip to the hard drive, a job that took 52 minutes. In the interim, I used the Media Center to watch some cable TV, check e-mail, and save screen grabs for this review.

The slot-loading changer also doubles as the system's DVD burner (the PC's single-disc drive is play-only). This makes it especially easy to archive your DVR recordings to disc, though there's no way to edit out the commercials. Just select which series to copy from the menu, and the system calculates how many blank discs you'll need and prompts you to insert them in the changer. Then you can walk away or use the Media Center for other activities. I successfully copied a couple of episodes of South Park that I'd recorded from Comedy Central.

Of course, the real value of combining a megachanger with a Media Center PC is one-stop parking of your entire DVD collection, or at least your 200 favorite discs. The promise of this approach is that storage, indexing, and play functions fall into place with onscreen, computer-controlled efficiency and with disc descriptions and cover art downloaded from the Internet. All you do is point the remote.