NEC will put on sale next week its new Lui PC and home media server. The Lui can tune into digital high-definition TV broadcasts and stream both live and recorded programs to compatible TVs and computers and allow remote Windows desktop access from portable devices.

Seen late last year for the first time as a prototype, the Lui is akin to a DVR (digital video recorder) and PC packed together into a single, large case. It's intended to sit in the living room next to a television as a central server for multimedia content, and manages this task well -- except when digital rights management (DRM) gets in its way.

On the DVR side of things are dual terrestrial HDTV tuners and a single HDTV satellite tuner. The more expensive of the two models available includes a Blu-ray Disc drive and 1T byte of hard-disk storage, which is enough space for recording 120 hours of terrestrial digital TV, while the cheaper model has a 500G-byte hard-disk drive and DVD drive.

Alongside these is a fully-fledged computer running Windows Vista Premium and based on a 2GHz Core2Duo processor. It has 2G bytes of memory, an ATI Mobility Radeon HD2600 graphics card and its own 320G-byte hard disk drive.

For this NEC is asking users to pay ¥379,800 (US$3,753) for the high-end model and ¥329,910 for the other, putting it near the top end of the PC market.

The Lui's dual tuners allow the recording of one channel and viewing of another, and it can also be used as a conventional Windows personal computer. But it's when the user steps away from the living room that its really begins to show its advantage over other PCs and starts to justify its high price.

Within the home, live or recorded TV or content from the Blu-ray/DVD drive can be streamed across a LAN connection to a DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) compatible television or personal computer. The dual tuners allow one station to be on in the living room while another is watched somewhere else or for a Blu-ray Disc in the Lui to be watched on a PC while a recorded show is watched on the main TV.

But this function isn't quite a feature-rich as it could be. Streaming across wireless isn't possible with the Lui -- not for technical reasons but because of rights management concerns to stop piracy.

The PC desktop of the Lui can also be shared. Using either of two portable thin clients that NEC will also put on sale from next week, the Lui desktop can be accessed from inside or outside the home across a wired or wireless network connection, and the Lui's Windows desktop be used as if in front of the main PC. But again there's a restriction -- Windows licensing only allows one user to be logged in at a time so during remote access sessions the PC desktop cannot be used locally.