I was helping a friend look at the CDJ-400 the other day.
Love the USB addition to the deck.

Will we see a future DVJ series with a firewire or USB connection so that we can just hook up our hard drive with Quicktime clips on it and play and scratch n' scrub with the great DVj interface and without having to burn all of our own DVD's?

sign me up to the R&D team!!!

K-Tel

Troubles with non-DVD media:

- There is no "standard" for video media and some require more horsepower than others simply to play them. This would require an insane amount of processing to do what a DVJ does with the wide variety of formats / codecs in the public domain.

- Not only would the unit need to be insanely powerful, you're running the razor of reliability. As we all know, garbage in = garbage out. A bad MP3 can crash a program, think what a poorly encoded video file could do to a DVJ. Obviously there would need to be some kind of error-correction or possibly even a super read-ahead to ensure no problems will occur, but it just seems like you're asking for trouble.

- Quality is not guaranteed. Just like MP3s, there's no way to expect that a DJ / DVJ will use the best that's available to him. We've all heard some DJ play 128k MP3 files at an event and we've cringed at the low fidelity. Can you imagine someone doing the same ... but potentially worse ... to video? The visuals can eat it bigtime with some of the compression available out there, even if the audio is pristine. I'm afraid of what is to come!

- While I expect a non-DVD-DVJ would be able to pull media from one source, expecting multiple DVJs to work in unison from that single source might be a data flow nightmare which would result in the same situation people are in today with the CDJ400; requiring two copies of their external hard drives in order to play the same songs on both players. (This is actually a pet peeve of mine, those people should have at least 2 copies anyhow in case one of them crashes.)

- That's all I can think of. As much as I'd love to see it happen, there's just so many hurdles keeping it from a near-future reality.

Yeah, all good points....

too bad.

I totally understand the desire - same as having all your audio in MP3 and using something like Serato; it's all there and it's easy.

I do believe we'll eventually see it, I just don't know if that means 5-10 years down the road and a newer or limited set of codecs would be used to keep things on the level.