LaCie LaCinema Premier Media Drive
Review by Robert Young-Pullman | Published March 2008 | Review Archives

The LaCinema Premier from hard disk maker LaCie is either (a) an external computer hard drive with a few bells and whistles, (b) a useful and inexpensive necessity for anyone with an entertainment center, or (c) the bane of the movie industry that will bring Hollywood whimpering to its knees.

Nearly a quarter century ago, Apple Computer made a big show of how slight their easy-to-use computer's manual was compared to the thousands of pages of documentation needed for an IBM PC. Today, downsizing products isn't just a novelty but a consumer right. It makes no sense to line your wall with shelves just to hold jewel cases for CDs, and now devices like the LaCinema Premier are making DVD boxes obsolete too.

The LaCinema is a normal USB external hard disk with a sliding price tag and capacity ($250 for the 500 GB drive, $350 for the 740 GB drive, and $500 for the 1 TB drive). What makes it different from your palm-sized desktop flash drive is a full panel of Audio/Visual outputs - composite, S-Video, analog stereo, optical and coaxial surround-capable digital inputs).

Incredibly, there are very few products that do for video what iTunes has done for music. That's what the LaCinema does. You simply rip your DVDs (or get them - ahem - by other means), copy them from a computer and throw the old media DVDs and their bulky boxes away. The only downside here is that the LaCinema is not DivX compatible - a fairly glaring hole at least in "found" video files - but does handle MPEG1, 2 and 3, ISO, IFO and VOB files. (It can play mp3s and turn your TV into a jukebox too.)

And that brings up the big point. Just about every DVD you buy is - according to the people who sell it to you - off-limits for copying. The RIAA is currently suing a man in Arizona who made copies of his own CDs for completely private use. But nobody is going to use this to watch downloaded YouTube videos. Seriously, if that's your argument, don't make it. This is another product in the gray area of our times - it's an incredibly useful toy, even if the elves who made the stuff you're using it for hate it.