Vanilla USB flash drives are so passé, so for those who want a little more flavor more from their generic sticks of memory, might we point you to the SanDisk Sansa TakeTV, apparently freshly leaked by way of buy.com? (It also briefly appeared on PC Mag's site and SanDisk's forums among other sites.) Sure, the TakeTV an 8GB flash drive, but it's also intended to plug into a USB dock with TV outs (and remote), which is capable of reading and decoding the DivX, XviD, and MPEG-4 video files up to 720 x 576 and 7Mbps for playback on your TV. All the old school simplicity of home sneakernet combined with the one-stop-shop convenience of a USB flash drive. Unfortunately buy.com won't tell us when it's out or how much it'll cost, so no one gets to take home TakeTV just yet.
Update: This whole thing sound familiar? It might, SanDisk announced its
USBTV initiative at CES this year, so it looks like this is the first resulting product. Thanks to everyone who pointed this out.
[Thanks, Matt]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
PeteC @ Oct 20th 2007 4:05AM
It's not the worst idea ever, possibly easier than lugging my laptop over and plugging it in to my TV and better quality than streaming from my laptop to my xbox. If it's not massively more and I was in the market for a USB key, it would make sense but really, I'd like a cheap dock like this that can do this with any usb key or small external hard drive so can just plug and play into the TV and friends can show pictures or movies they may bring round straight up by plugging in, a cheap box that could do that would be nice and maybe even record to USB stick from an input too.
Scooter @ Oct 20th 2007 3:50PM
look for a DVD player with MP4, DivX etc. and a USB port in front. They are now common and cost $20-$30.
mj @ Oct 22nd 2007 4:37AM
a little off topic, but what is the best way to connect a computer so it displays on your tv?
Vizion @ Oct 20th 2007 4:14AM
Did engadget forget about Sandisk's USB TV? That was a concept shown as CES this year. This is the real deal. Please update your news with this info :)
doubl3 @ Oct 20th 2007 6:05PM
Seems like TakeTV IS UsbTv...
Try to go to usbtv.org, you will be redirected to take.tv...
Vizion @ Oct 20th 2007 8:47PM
That is what I was implying. Engadget makes no mention fo the USBTV. It was merely in prototype form at CES, but this is the real deal (i.e. the official release).
John Doe @ Oct 20th 2007 4:15AM
Yah know. I'm wondering what real innovations have been neutered all because USB 2 is still so damn slow. It really is a shame that FireWire 800 never hit a critical enough mass, and dropped in price enough to drop kick USB 2 out of the park. I'm dead serious when I say that after using FW800 for the first time on an external SATA cage with hard drive that I can't go back to USB 2 again. USB 3 can't come fast enough.
D.L. @ Oct 20th 2007 4:18AM
It's the perfect companion to The Pirate bay.
Alex M @ Oct 20th 2007 7:07AM
and unfortunately* porn.
*fortunate for some
Chris Macdonald @ Oct 20th 2007 10:01AM
Does it have video in? can you record stuff with it?
LTM @ Oct 20th 2007 12:27PM
I've been looking for something like this, but it's lacking in a few areas. I was hoping I could send streaming video realplayer or Windows media from my computer to my TV wirelessly. I've got an HDMI connection on my computer and no HDMI connection on my TV, plus a VGA out and it would be great to send whatever is on my computer screen wirelessly from upstairs to my TV downstairs. Anyone know of such a product ( USB wireless to the TV's composite or Svideo in?
Fred @ Oct 20th 2007 3:30PM
Sandisk already has a official device forum for it at: http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board?board.id=taketv
I would have prefered to see this functionality integrated into a small form factor DAP with video-out supporting those formats, but I'll take what I can get. It should be doable to integrate video-out in a player like the Sandisk Sansa Express. I don't need (or want) a tiny 2" display on the device itself, since this would make the DAP to big.
David Gerard @ Oct 20th 2007 3:49PM
Heh. Reminds me of the old Margi Card, an outboard PC-card MPEG2 decoder for slow laptops. For Windows laptops in the hundreds-of-MHz range, it's still a fantastic way to make a cheap laptop a nice DVD player. It even made an IBM Thinkpad 560X (Pentium MMX 233MHz - that's Pentium original, not PII) running Win98 into a nice DVD player.
jessy @ Oct 20th 2007 4:16PM
no really... if sandisk made 30+gig mp3 players its clear they would hold a portion of the market.
wtf, this is a decent inventive product. i havent seen other mp3 player companies do anything this exciting yet. wirless sync? okay, but not really inventive. and apple, i wont go their, just their ideas are okay but nothing like this.
Dave Zatz @ Oct 20th 2007 7:01PM
I checked the Google cache and Buy.com lists this for $149.
Fred @ Oct 21st 2007 3:15AM
$149 is to rich, IMO.
grjohnston @ Oct 21st 2007 7:36AM
... Robots?
will @ Oct 21st 2007 11:28AM
the device only outputs to s-video and composite?
bluezzy @ Oct 22nd 2007 7:35PM
will it support .avi?
Ajaxx @ Oct 23rd 2007 12:09AM
It supports Divx movies, so yes .avi
David Allouch @ Nov 15th 2007 8:41AM
Got one. it plays AVI well.
This is so useful I cant even describe.
JP @ Jan 3rd 2008 11:20AM
Got one for myself for this Christmas. The 8gm model. Easy to set up and plays most AVI's just fine. Haven't figured out the mpeg support yet tho but that's probably just a limitation of my own knowlege of formats. Hope they will support other formats soon tho. I love what it does so for for $150 bucks.