SanDisk lets you see video from PC on TV if you're patient

— -- In its own way, the company famous for its data storage products is competing against less-portable and more-expensive products — Apple TV, Microsoft Windows Media Center Extenders, even TiVo.

SanDisk hopes TakeTV and a new companion Web service called Fanfare will let folks catch up on favorite shows in their own time. But with too few available shows and movies on the service, Fanfare is not ready for prime time.

Befitting SanDisk's roots, TakeTV is built around a roughly 4-inch-tall, 1½-inch-wide USB thumb drive that is conveniently concealed in a small holder. This stick, which you can easily stash in your pocket, is where you store video files dragged off a computer — about five hours of playback on a 4-gigabyte $100 version or $150 for an 8-GB, 10-hour version. The holder itself doubles as TakeTV's remote control. The remaining piece is a small cradle you connect to a TV.

Here's how it all comes together:

•Setup. Installing TakeTV isn't hard, but I still ran into snags during my tests.

Before you can transfer such shows as CSI: Miami and Penn & Teller from the Fanfare site, you plug the stick into a USB port on a Windows XP or Windows Vista PC. TakeTV doesn't work with Macs. The software to install Fanfare is included on the TakeTV thumb drive. Minor hassle: I had to separately download a couple of extra components to make this work, including the latest Adobe Flash add-on for my browser, plus Microsoft's. Net software technology for helping manage the service.

Moving shows onto TakeTV inside Fanfare is easy. You position your mouse over the episode you want to add and click on a "+" button; to free up space, you click on "—." I wish there were a "time remaining" indicator to tell you how long the process will take. A progress bar helps only a little. It took about 15 minutes to load a 33-minute episode of Showtime's Fat Actress. You can transfer more than one show at a time.