Multimedia appliance

The present invention is directed to an multimedia appliance. The media appliance is suitably seamless, that is, transparent to the user, through its interconnection, control, signal routing, multimedia content management, and the like. In accordance with one aspect of the invention, the media appliance enables the viewing, listening, multimedia searching and fetching and similar functions while simultaneously providing the ability to record or store other multimedia content through a single user interface. A media appliance of the present invention includes a disc-playing mechanism and a drive for storage. The storage drive may be a magnetic memory, such as a hard drive. The disc-playing mechanism may be an optical disc carrier. A media appliance may also incorporate connectivity to the Internet to facilitate the transmission and receipt of various file formats for audio and video reproduction. The media appliance may be coupled to a television monitor to display images transmitted by the media appliance. The media appliance may also be coupled to one or more speakers for the reproduction of audio signals.