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... 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/

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 the Linux MediaServer - there is a server available for Linux. No UI yet, but Rob Flickenger made a nice perl script to catalog your media files for the MediaPlayer.

- Mike

- Mike

- Mike

The prismiq folks said that they will be working on a media configuration file creation code for linux, but I'm guessing that it's a bit lower on their list of priorities right now. To keep up to speed on prismiq developments, check out the prismiq forums and user website.

(yes, I've actually done this and have it working at home)

- Mike

First, the theory behind this device is fairly good. There's limited processing on the client device, and the heavy lifting gets done by the server, the way things ought to be.

The actual configuration files are human-readable with a little bit of effort, and I've even hacked mine up with some success to redo playlists to make more sense.

The bad news is that for large collections of audio (and probably also video) the playlist navigation on the client is really unacceptable. There's only a single level of playlists, so you can't do a lot of things that you would normally do with a hierarchial setup that makes navigating easy. The other problem is that scrolling through the playlists is very, very slow, so in reality a old Rio receiver is faster to navigate, which is a real bummer since I got mine in hopes of having a clean replacement for the Rio's lackluster playlist navigation :-(

On the positive side, they have a user site prismiq.org with good forums that a number of users have been using to communicate how to make limited improvements on both the client and server side. I do think it shows a lot of promise, but don't expect it to be an out-of-the-box instant solution to your media problems...

- Mike

Not that that the product is bad, but few of them really tell anything more than what I can read on the product homepage.

Check out the user forums at www.prismiq.ORG (and click on "forums" on the left side.) There are a lot of PRISMIQ users active on the forums, and you are bound to see a lot of opinions. And you can always post your own questions and have a good chance someone will answer.

For the brave experimentors, there is also some information on controlling the PRISMIQ player from another host and a rather rough (or should I say "early"?) version of the server software that runs on i386 Linux (as opposed to the official Win32 server software).

Isn't it a bit insecure for it to scan the entire hard disk drive of an old Windows machine for media files?

The PRISMIQ software asks you which directory you want to scan and what file extensions to look for.
How secure is the communication if one decides to use it in its wireless incarnation?

Someone who could sniff your wireless traffic could probably snarf a copy of the audio and video streams. So if you're paranoid, don't stream your steamy home movies over wireless :-)

If you are interested in seeing a lot of real users discussing the PRISMIQ box, go to www.prismiq.ORG and click on "forums".