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I have to agree. I love the SlimServer, but I don't have a Sqeezebox and instead use it to stream my collection to my desk at work, and to plug my laptop into my stereo at home. Don't get me wrong, I think the Squeezebox is a beautiful piece of engineering, and I do covet the digital output. But I'm not enough of an audiophile to consider it mandatory, and for $300 what me and my family are looking for is something to fully bridge the content on our home computer network and home theater. I want a device that will play our digital music collection through the stereo but also play visual media from our computers, like slideshows of our photos and .AVI and .MPG files, plus do visualizations like those found in WMP/iTunes/Winamp. PrismQ and DLink products and Hauppauge have products that do some or all of that stuff.

How about a "headless" Squeezebox, one without the flourescent display that instead did all the display through a video output? Losing the display would lower the price, too. Maybe even better, keep the same price-point AND keep the high-end pedigree of the SqueezeBox line offering not only composite and SVideo output but by including COMPONENT video output with Faroudja upconversion. THAT'S what I want to buy, from SlimDevices, rather than the DLink and such mentioned above. When can I place my order?

... and are willing to do some hacking, I've always thought that the Roku Photobridge and Prismiq Media Player would make nice little MythTV front ends due to their hackability, wireless support, hardware decoders and digital outs.

Don't know much about the Roku (except that they're pretty open with developer support), but as administrator for a project that does open source for the Prismiq it should be doable to port mythfrontend to the box. Particularly since Prismiq released the source.

(plus, you can probably get one dirt cheap on eBay).

You forgot the Prismiq media player, and the soon to be launched Prismiq media center. http://www.prismiq.com/ http://www.prismiq.org/

http://www.prismiq.com/

The player does everything I want except TV. Then I saw that they're coming out with a Player/Recorder that looks really interesting. Unfortunately, it's been delayed until early next year.

But I can wait.

I just bought one on ebay for $120.

http://www.prismiq.com/

It handles video (MPEG1/2/4, Motion MPEG, AVI and Divx), audio (MP3, WMA and WAV), images (JPEG, GIF, PNG), etc. It has both a Winblows and a Linux Media Server and can be connected via a wireless or wired connection.

Best thing is that it runs Linux. ;-)

On the subject of Tivo, I really can't comment...they don't currently allow Canadians to use their service, hence our being stuck with either a cable-co PVR (at ~700 US, not likely!) or BYO.

I'm just having problems understanding why people have so much difficulty with setting them up. Components exist to make all of this easy.

My fiance and I run an older ATI tuner board on a little-used PC recording (using GuidePlus, still going after 5 years) to MPEG-2. We looked at running output to the TV and it was too much of a pain, so we spent roughly $170 US on a Prismiq set-top box (running Linux, no less) that will work wired or wireless to bring our music, movies, and photos to our TV. No setup, no wires, no problems. Once a month or so, I give it a reboot to clear the RAM. That's about it.

Don't assume that every BYO PVR has to be a hardcore Linux box with hours of work pounded into it. Sometimes, there's a middle-ground between high-priced consumer models and BYO...

As an aside, I do spend hours on my Linux servers and love them, but I want my TV to be simple.

Not sure if this falls into your budget, but Prismiq just lowered the price of their media gateway to $150 if you enter the promo code FALLMP04. I just ordered one today.

Prismiq is a media gateway that searches your network (wired or wireless) for MP3s, JPEGs, and movie files, and displays them on your TV with audio going through your stereo. You operate it through simple menus on your TV with a remote or wireless keyboard.

It might be a good solution for the simple interface you want, and it leverages your parents' stereo system, without requiring a noisy PC to sit in their living room. All you would need to provide is the box that rips and stores the files and make them accessible to the gateway over a network.

I've had a Prismiq for about a year now. I'm mostly pretty happy with it - I'd like a better UI, a remote that doesn't think it's a mouse, and server side (the Prismiq is an embedded Linux device that cooperates with Windows server software on a PC) software that could be run as a service (at the moment it requires a user logged on to run - therefore sucks on a dedicated server). Occassionally I have to re-encode stuff because the Prismiq chokes (for no apparent reason) on some files but across a 100Mb cable it streams video with little problem. It has a PCMIA slot for Wifi but reports are that it's hard to configure and jerky to use.

I have a Prismiq. It's pretty good, but not as cool as it sounds. It plays mpeg4 quite well, and streams radio from the net, but still has some issues. Linux support is not great, even though the device itself runs linux. Videos freeze. FF/REW rarely works. The software often runs multiple instances of itself for no reason. All in all, it's much cooler than nothing at all, and much easier than a linux box as a PVR, but has so much unrealized potential.

I've been researching chipsets for digital TV. Here are my links to current hardware products:

STMicroelectronics System on Chip (2) Get Linux here
ATI Xilleon 220 (Products)
Sigma Designs Digital Media Processors (Products)
IBM PowerPC405 STBxx (Zarlink [2], Araneo)
Texas Instruments DM642 DSP (i3 Mood Box , X-Designs Flikit + Softier MediaLinux)
NEC EMMArchitecture2 (Galaxis + LinuxTV , PRISMIQ + Linux)
Equator Technologies BSP-15 boards
Via CN400 (Mini-ITX Board), PM800 and PM880 (w/ HDTV for Pentium 4) , ShowShifter HMN, Soyo Multimedia Ready Motherboard (with TV Tuner, $129.99)
Toshiba TX System RISC (MontaVista Linux)
Windows chipsets:
Intel 815 VisionPlus terrestrial box (Korean OEM)
AMD Geode (CoCom)
ARM (Samsung, etc.)
Digeo X-Stream (Paul Allen company)

Harry

Check out Prismiq. Supports audio and video (lots of formats - yes divx). Its also extremely hackable, based on Linux - lots of support from the developers on how to hack it, including publishing the communication protocol between the server software and the hardware device.

So, in what format do they send the video to the device?

The video is transcoded on the fly to MPEG1. The transcoder itself is based on the ffmpeg/libavcodec project, so anyone is free to extend the capabilities, see how it works, or write a new one. If you are curious, you can download the Win32 build environment, tools, and source code here:
update.prismiq.com/plugins/

...at least by modern standards. The PD61130 MPEG2 Decoder, as NEC calls it, provides 200 Dhrystone MIPS at 167 MHz / 160 MIPS at 133 MHz using an "Integrated high-performance CPU: NEC MIPS(R)-based VR4120A(TM) core". Note that these are MIPS, or Meaningless Indicators of Processor Speed. Meaningless why? They're produced by benchmarks! Anyway, it only supports up to 64MB of SDRAM... Thinkgeek's "specifications" says the processor is a "NEC uPD61130 32-bit MIPS microprocessor with integrated MPEG decoder", but they don't bother to mention that it's an MPEG2 decoder, not MPEG2+4.

They say the device plays DivX, but since it doesn't have an MPEG4 decoder, it all has to be done in software, and I'm skeptical about the device's ability to play high-bitrate MPEG4 (DivX, XVid, others) streams. And while they say that the device will be easily extensible to support future formats, if they are anything like MPEG4, then it certainly won't be fast enough to play them.

MIPS is kind enough to provide a newsletter which comes up in a search for "4210A" which contains the following interesting paragraph:

EMMArchitecture2 is designed for mid/high-end STB/ DTV applications such as Personal Video Recorders (PVR) and wireless IP STBs. It uses the NEC-designed MIPS CPU 4120A, plus NEC's original audio DSP, versatile stream processing engine and ATA I/F, together with a PCI bus. This unique architecture allows not only a single-chip, mid-range PVR configuration, which is controlled by an on-chip 200-mips 4120A CPU, but also a high-end, multi-chip STB configuration, which utilizes a PCI to connect an external high-performance CPU such as NEC's 500-mips, MIPS-based(TM) VR5500A CPU, together with a PCI bus bridge.

But, as the specifications for the PrismIQ show, they are not in fact including a VR5500A, just the VR4120A-based PD61130. I assume this plays the majority of MPEG4 content today, or else they wouldn't be selling it, but as bitrates rise, I believe that they will be in trouble.

Note that I have never seen let alone tested one of these, so I am just wanking in the dark here, but it doesn't seem likely to really provide the necessary longetivity. We all know that amazing things can be done with a 200MHz MIPS chip, go ait down at an SGI Indy sometime if you don't believe me, but I think the lack of an MPEG4 decoder will hurt them in the long run. There are numerous MPEG4 hardware solutions available today, and unfortunately, they did not see fit to use any of them.

...at least by modern standards. The PD61130 MPEG2 Decoder, as NEC calls it, provides 200 Dhrystone MIPS at 167 MHz / 160 MIPS at 133 MHz using an "Integrated high-performance CPU: NEC MIPS(R)-based VR4120A(TM) core". Note that these are MIPS, or Meaningless Indicators of Processor Speed. Meaningless why? They're produced by benchmarks! Anyway, it only supports up to 64MB of SDRAM... Thinkgeek's "specifications" says the processor is a "NEC uPD61130 32-bit MIPS microprocessor with integrated MPEG decoder", but they don't bother to mention that it's an MPEG2 decoder, not MPEG2+4.

They say the device plays DivX, but since it doesn't have an MPEG4 decoder, it all has to be done in software, and I'm skeptical about the device's ability to play high-bitrate MPEG4 (DivX, XVid, others) streams. And while they say that the device will be easily extensible to support future formats, if they are anything like MPEG4, then it certainly won't be fast enough to play them.

MIPS is kind enough to provide a newsletter which comes up in a search for "4210A" which contains the following interesting paragraph:

EMMArchitecture2 is designed for mid/high-end STB/ DTV applications such as Personal Video Recorders (PVR) and wireless IP STBs. It uses the NEC-designed MIPS CPU 4120A, plus NEC's original audio DSP, versatile stream processing engine and ATA I/F, together with a PCI bus. This unique architecture allows not only a single-chip, mid-range PVR configuration, which is controlled by an on-chip 200-mips 4120A CPU, but also a high-end, multi-chip STB configuration, which utilizes a PCI to connect an external high-performance CPU such as NEC's 500-mips, MIPS-based(TM) VR5500A CPU, together with a PCI bus bridge.

But, as the specifications for the PrismIQ show, they are not in fact including a VR5500A, just the VR4120A-based PD61130. I assume this plays the majority of MPEG4 content today, or else they wouldn't be selling it, but as bitrates rise, I believe that they will be in trouble.

Note that I have never seen let alone tested one of these, so I am just wanking in the dark here, but it doesn't seem likely to really provide the necessary longetivity. We all know that amazing things can be done with a 200MHz MIPS chip, go ait down at an SGI Indy sometime if you don't believe me, but I think the lack of an MPEG4 decoder will hurt them in the long run. There are numerous MPEG4 hardware solutions available today, and unfortunately, they did not see fit to use any of them.

"MediaManager Windows-compliant software, which runs on the networked PC to detect suitable PC and Internet files anywhere on the home network..."