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First, does the HD1000 support IR based remotes out of the box

The stock Roku remote is an IR unit. I don't know how programmable things are on the Roku itself, for example if you can get the unit to understand additional codes.

is the software interface designed to be used while looking at a standard television from a respectable distance?

Certainly from an HDTV, which would tend to have a large screen. I don't know about a "standard" TV. They have some screen shots of the current interface on their web site, so you might consider what those would be like on your TV. It may be that you'll be able to customize this further (larger fonts or whatever) when the SDK comes out.

Video Output
Component Y/Pr/Pb: 1080i, 720p, 480p, 480i
VGA: 1080i, 720p, 480p

No recording though.

I've got a pcHDTV card and have done some transport stream captures in Linux. I've tried playing them back on a friend's Shuttle XPC (running Linux) with an Athlon XP2400+ and GeForceFX 5200. NVidia's drivers do support XvMC (motion compensation) on this card, and Xine is able to take advantage of it. But I'm still not 100% thrilled with the performance. There's some slight judder/jitter, mostly noticable in smooth pans, and that's with everything scaled to 1280 pixels wide. If I try to run the display at 1920 pixels wide, it seems to stress the fill rate or in any case cause it to get much choppier.

Supposedly GeForce4 MX cards might actually have better XvMC support, but I haven't verified this. For this specific purpose I think the general advice is that the GF4MX cards are better than GF4Ti models.

Not that Windows HD cards and drivers are apparently much better. I've seen complaints from at least one Windows HTPC user that he's not happy with playback there either.

So a bunch of us are watching the Roku HD1000 unit very closely. This is a set-top box based around the ATI Xilleon chip -- a MIPS core surrounded by specialized graphics hardware, including full HDTV MPEG decoding.

Best of all, it runs Linux. An initial SDK (gcc toolchain) is due out in the next week or so. There are Roku folks hanging out in the main Roku thread at avsforum, and have been answering questions and taking suggestions. They also just set up a mailing list of their own for technical discussions.

As soon as the product was announced there were a bunch of us who immediately thought of using this as a transport stream player, and although the initial firmware does not do that, they have already released two beta versions in the last few weeks developing this as a feature. Apparently their developers also have HD capture cards and have an interest in making this work :-)

I've got a pcHDTV card and have done some transport stream captures in Linux. I've tried playing them back on a friend's Shuttle XPC (running Linux) with an Athlon XP2400+ and GeForceFX 5200. NVidia's drivers do support XvMC (motion compensation) on this card, and Xine is able to take advantage of it. But I'm still not 100% thrilled with the performance. There's some slight judder/jitter, mostly noticable in smooth pans, and that's with everything scaled to 1280 pixels wide. If I try to run the display at 1920 pixels wide, it seems to stress the fill rate or in any case cause it to get much choppier.

Supposedly GeForce4 MX cards might actually have better XvMC support, but I haven't verified this. For this specific purpose I think the general advice is that the GF4MX cards are better than GF4Ti models.

Not that Windows HD cards and drivers are apparently much better. I've seen complaints from at least one Windows HTPC user that he's not happy with playback there either.

So a bunch of us are watching the Roku HD1000 unit very closely. This is a set-top box based around the ATI Xilleon chip -- a MIPS core surrounded by specialized graphics hardware, including full HDTV MPEG decoding.

Best of all, it runs Linux. An initial SDK (gcc toolchain) is due out in the next week or so. There are Roku folks hanging out in the main Roku thread at avsforum, and have been answering questions and taking suggestions. They also just set up a mailing list of their own for technical discussions.

As soon as the product was announced there were a bunch of us who immediately thought of using this as a transport stream player, and although the initial firmware does not do that, they have already released two beta versions in the last few weeks developing this as a feature. Apparently their developers also have HD capture cards and have an interest in making this work :-)