Ximeta Inc. is developing software that will allow the Sony Playstation 2 to serve as a home media player, the company said.

The software, shown in prototype form at the DigitalLife show here, will allow a PlayStation 2 to connect to a Ximeta removable hard drive, allowing the game console to play back recorded files on a television screen. Since the hard drive takes advantage of the PlayStation 2's native capabilities, the software won't be able to decode video for use as a PVR, spokesman Michael Chin said.

With more and more companies realizing that the PVR functionality offered by TiVo and others is little more than a software service and a hard drive, storage companies are looking to cash in on the capacity demands of digital video. In the booth next door, for example, Plextor Corp. executives were showing off the ConvertXPVR PXT-TV402U, which uses a dedicated hardware tuner peripheral to transcode video from a set-top box into MPEG-1, -2, -4, or DiVX and store it inside of a PC hard drive or optical disk.

Ximeta's solution does not require a PC, just one of the company's removable hard drives, which range up to 250 Gbytes in capacity. The software will require the PlayStation 2's network interface to be enabled. The console does not ship with a hard drive, but one can be purchased to use with certain games, such as the latest Final Fantasy online RPG. The PS2 can also play back DVDs.

"It's just a matter of enabling the device driver in the OS," Chin said.

Ximeta's hard drives use its NDAS technology, which allows the drives to connect to either a USB, IEEE 1394 or Ethernet connection; employing the latter connection allows multiple users to read and write to the drive.

Ximeta has not decided on a price for the software, Chin said.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in ExtremeTech.