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Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VideoLan and developer of VLC media player, made the following announced Monday: AV1 is a new video codec by the Alliance for Open Media, composed of most of the important Web companies (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft,...). AV1 has the potential to be up to 20% better than the HEVC codec, but the patents license is totally free, while HEVC patents licenses are insanely high and very confusing.

The reference decoder for AV1 is great, but it's a research codebase, so it has a lot to improve. Therefore, the VideoLAN, VLC and FFmpeg communities have started to work on a new decoder, sponsored by the Alliance of Open Media. The goal of this new decoder is: be small, be as fast as possible, be very cross-platform, correctly threaded, libre and (actually) Open Source. Without further due, the code: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d Recommended: A talk during VDD 2018 conference about dav1d.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Some newer Huawei phones are actively being blocked from installing the open-source VLC media player app from Google Play. VLC's developers announced today that they're blacklisting some of Huawei's devices after unhappy users left too many one-star reviews for the app. But the negative reviews stem from a decision on Huawei's part and has nothing to do with VLC. The negative reviews are a result of Huawei's aggressive battery management and tendency to kill background apps, which directly affects VLC's background audio playback feature. Huawei users on VLC's forums are well aware of the issue. It's possible to manually disable these battery optimizations and have the app function properly in the background, but VLC claims that people often don't know how to do that, so they blame the app instead. The devices being blacklisted are the Huawei P8, P10, and P20. Users can still manually download the APK from VLC's website if they're interested in using the player.

Ian Paul, writing for PCWorld: The best free media player is getting even better. After three years of development, VLC 3.0 'Ventari' is rolling out to all platforms, and it's packed full of goodies such as Chromecast support. The latest version of VLC contains a lot of great additions, as well as a tweaked UI. Chromecast discovery tops the list. It's only available on Windows desktop and Android right now, but Videolan says the feature's coming to VLC's iOS and the Windows Store apps in the future. [...] VLC 3.0's refreshed UI isn't a fresh, new look from previous versions, but it is noticeably different. The icons at the bottom of the window are cleaner, and the small icons used within menu items are also new. Version 3.0 also adds support for 360-degree video and 3D audio, readying features for a VR version of VLC slated to roll out in mid-April. The new VLC also adds hardware decoding across all platforms for better performance and less CPU consumption, especially when dealing with more resource-intense video.

VideoLAN has released a technical preview of VLC Media Player 3.0 with 360-degree video support. The new build handles videos following the Spatial Video format, and photos and panoramas following the Spherical spec (the official test page has sample files). More on this: The files play back just like any other video, but you can now left-click and drag within the screen or use the numeric keypad arrows to look around. VideoLAN says there are multiple display modes -- Zoom, Little Planet and Reverse Little Planet -- although we couldn't immediately see how they were activated. This initial release is only available for Windows and Mac, but eventually 360-degree support will arrive for Android, iOS and Xbox One, with VR headset support likely to arrive in 2017.

An anonymous reader writes: The Graphics and Media Lab Video Group of Moscow State University has released its tenth video codecs comparison. This latest comparison focuses on HEVC codecs and includes some non-HEVC codecs such as x264 and VP9. The report concludes that Intel's MSS HEVC Software codec leads the pack in the "fast transcoding" use case whereas x265 takes the lead in the "ripping" use case. VP9 compares favorably to the HEVC codecs in the fixed quality and the speed versus quality test cases. See the PDF version of the report for more details.

An anonymous reader writes VideoLAN today launched what is arguably the biggest release of VLC to date: an update for the desktop coordinated with new versions across all major mobile platforms. The world's most-used media player just got a massive cross-platform push. The organization says the releases are the result of more than a year of volunteer work on the VLC engine and the libVLC library. As a result, VLC has gained numerous new features, has seen more than 1,000 bugs fixed, and has significantly increased its scope of supported formats.

An anonymous reader writes VideoLAN today launched what is arguably the biggest release of VLC to date: an update for the desktop coordinated with new versions across all major mobile platforms. The world's most-used media player just got a massive cross-platform push. The organization says the releases are the result of more than a year of volunteer work on the VLC engine and the libVLC library. As a result, VLC has gained numerous new features, has seen more than 1,000 bugs fixed, and has significantly increased its scope of supported formats.

jones_supa writes: Two weekends ago an update for VLC media player was shared during a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM. Lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf covered VLC's continued vibrant development, as well as features that are coming for VLC 2.2 and VLC 3.0. VLC 2.2.0 will feature automatic, GPU-accelerated video rotation support, extension improvements, resume handling, support for new codecs/formats and rewrites to some of the existing formats, VDPAU GPU zero-copy support, x265 encoder support, etc. Further out is VLC 3.0.0, which is planned to have Wayland support, GPU zero-copy support for OpenMAX IL, ARIB subtitle support, HEVC / VP9 hardware decoding on Android, a rework of the MP4 and TS demuxers, and browsing improvements. The VLC FOSDEM 2015 presentation is available in PDF form. The VLC Git shortlog can be used to follow the development of the project.

An anonymous reader writes "With a new audio core, hardware decoding and encoding, port to mobile platforms, preparation for Ultra-HD video and a special care to support more formats, 2.1 is a major upgrade for VLC. The popular video player app also features support for 4K video as well as a partial Windows 8 and WinRT port for all those folks out there who don't know what else to do with their Surface RT."

benjymouse writes "Following a blog post by security company Secunia, VideoLAN (vendor of popular VLC media player) president Jean-Baptiste Kempf accuses Secunia of lying in a blog post titled 'More lies from Secunia.' It seems that Secunia and Jean-Baptiste Kempf have different views on whether a vulnerability has been patched. At one point VLC threatened legal action unless Secunia updated their SA51464 security advisory to show the issue as patched. While Secunia changed the status pending their own investigation, they later reverted to 'unpatched.' Secunia claimed that they had PoC illustrating that the root issue still existed and 3rd party confirmation (an independent security researcher found the same issue and reported it to Secunia)." There are two bugs: one is a vulnerability in ffmpeg's swf parser that vlc worked around since they don't support swf. The VLC developers think Secunia should have reported the bug to ffmpeg, which seems pretty sensible. The other bug is an uncaught exception in the Matroska demuxer with overly large chunks that merely results in std::terminate being called; the Matroska demux maintainer apologized, but, despite dire warnings from Secunia that it could be exploitable, it most certainly is not.

An anonymous reader sent in a link to an article in Wired about the latest DMCA loophole hearing. Bad news: the federal government rejected requests that would make console modding and breaking DRM on DVDs to watch them legal. So, you dirty GNU/Linux hippies using libdvdcss better watch out: "Librarian of Congress James Billington and Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante rejected the two most-sought-after items on the docket, game-console modding and DVD cracking for personal use and 'space shifting.' Congress plays no role in the outcome. The regulators said that the controls were necessary to prevent software piracy and differentiated gaming consoles from smart phones, which legally can be jailbroken. ... On the plus side, the regulators re-authorized jailbreaking of mobile phones. On the downside, they denied it for tablets, saying an 'ebook reading device might be considered a tablet, as might a handheld video game device.'" So you can jailbreak a phone, but if it's 1" larger and considered a "tablet" you are breaking the law.

Titus Andronicus writes "Years in the making, the major new release of VideoLAN's media player has better support for multicore processors, GPUs, and much, much more. From the announcement: 'Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos. It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental). Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use. Twoflower fixes several hundreds of bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has removed VLC media player from the App Store, putting an end to the controversy on the license (in)compatibilities. Indeed, the iTunes page for VLC media player stopped working. VLC developer Rémi Denis-Courmont notes that he is 'not going to pity the owners of iDevices, and not even the MobileVLC developers who doubtless wasted a lot of their time. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone.'"

Stoobalou writes "The people behind VLC, quite probably the most useful media player available right now, have submitted an iPod version to the Apple software police. VLC — which is rightfully famous for having a go at playing just about any kind of audio or video file you care to throw at it — should appear some time next week, if it makes it through the often unfathomable approval process implemented by Apple. The Open Source Video Lan Client has been tweaked to run on the iPod by software developer Applidium."

supersloshy writes "VideoLAN, makers of the well-known media player VLC, have just announced a new project called libaacs. The libaacs library's intention is to provide a free software library to implement the AACS specification, the copy-protection found on things such as Blu-ray discs. Note that this isn't meant to actually be a decoding library. It includes no AACS keys and is solely developed for research purposes."

The folks over at VideoLAN are in the process of releasing version 1.1.0 of VLC, and one of the major changes is the removal of SHOUTcast, a media-streaming module from AOL-owned Nullsoft. "During the last year, the VLC developers have received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC." Within the license is a clause prohibiting the distribution of SHOUTcast with any product whose own license requires that it be "disclosed or distributed in source code form," "licensed for the purpose of making derivative works," or "redistributable at no charge." The license would also force VideoLAN to bundle Nullsoft adware with VLC. Update: 06/22 00:52 GMT by H : The 1.1 release is ready from their site; you can also read up on the release information.

The folks over at VideoLAN are in the process of releasing version 1.1.0 of VLC, and one of the major changes is the removal of SHOUTcast, a media-streaming module from AOL-owned Nullsoft. "During the last year, the VLC developers have received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC." Within the license is a clause prohibiting the distribution of SHOUTcast with any product whose own license requires that it be "disclosed or distributed in source code form," "licensed for the purpose of making derivative works," or "redistributable at no charge." The license would also force VideoLAN to bundle Nullsoft adware with VLC. Update: 06/22 00:52 GMT by H : The 1.1 release is ready from their site; you can also read up on the release information.

The folks over at VideoLAN are in the process of releasing version 1.1.0 of VLC, and one of the major changes is the removal of SHOUTcast, a media-streaming module from AOL-owned Nullsoft. "During the last year, the VLC developers have received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC." Within the license is a clause prohibiting the distribution of SHOUTcast with any product whose own license requires that it be "disclosed or distributed in source code form," "licensed for the purpose of making derivative works," or "redistributable at no charge." The license would also force VideoLAN to bundle Nullsoft adware with VLC. Update: 06/22 00:52 GMT by H : The 1.1 release is ready from their site; you can also read up on the release information.

The folks over at VideoLAN are in the process of releasing version 1.1.0 of VLC, and one of the major changes is the removal of SHOUTcast, a media-streaming module from AOL-owned Nullsoft. "During the last year, the VLC developers have received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC." Within the license is a clause prohibiting the distribution of SHOUTcast with any product whose own license requires that it be "disclosed or distributed in source code form," "licensed for the purpose of making derivative works," or "redistributable at no charge." The license would also force VideoLAN to bundle Nullsoft adware with VLC. Update: 06/22 00:52 GMT by H : The 1.1 release is ready from their site; you can also read up on the release information.

snydeq writes "As open source becomes mainstream, vendors are under pressure to market their offerings using the 'open source' brand to the highest degree possible — a trend that may eventually degrade the meaning of 'open source' as we know it, Savio Rodrigues writes. Witness WebM, which Google has positioned as an open alternative to H.264. After examining the software license, some in the open source community have questioned whether WebM should be classified as open source software. Google did not use an OSI-approved license for WebM, meaning that, at least in theory, WebM cannot be considered open source under the OSD — the 'gold standard' by which many government and business open source policies are defined. Moreover, when prodded for OSI review, Google required that the OSI agree to 'changes to how OSI does licenses' as a precursor to submitting a license for OSI review and approval. 'When Google, one of the largest supporters of open source, goes out and purposefully circumvents the OSI, what signal does this send to other vendors? How important is using an OSI-approved license likely to be in the future if other vendors follow Google's lead?'" An anonymous reader adds: "It turns out that libvpx, Google's VP8 library, isn't compatible with the GPLv2. Google is apparently aware of the problem and working on a solution.

plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."

rift321 writes "VLC media player, which we all know for simplifying the playback of pretty much any codec out there, has finally released version 1.0.0. Here's a quick list of improvements: live recording, instant pausing and frame-by-frame support, finer speed controls, new HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0), new formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS) and major improvements in many formats, new Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder, video scaling in fullscreen, RTSP Trickplay support, zipped file playback, customizable toolbars, easier encoding GUI in Qt interface, better integration in Gtk environments, MTP devices on Linux, and AirTunes streaming."

Matt Asay points out a recent update to VLC as they narrow in on a 1.0 release. Already a favorite of many, the open source project has made great strides in recent history towards really solidifying the position as best-in-class. This update, 0.9.9, fixes several display bugs and sees some definite performance improvements. "If you've yet to try VLC, do so. Whether you just want to play media files or also want to convert them, VLC can handle just about anything you throw at it. When all other media players fail, whether on Windows, Linux, or the Mac, VLC will almost always deliver. You can download VLC media player 0.9.9 here. It's open source, but that's not why you'll want to keep using it. You'll use it because it's better than its proprietary peers — by a long stretch.

npongratz writes "Standing at six feet tall and growing an inch per hour, a corpse flower is set to bloom at the Milwaukee Public Museum. You can keep tabs on this once-in-six-years event in streaming 1080p HD (using VLC), or a lower-bandwidth image feed. A live feed from the smelloscope is unfortunately a few centuries away from being invented."

dylan_- writes "According to their website, 'Dirac is an advanced royalty-free video compression format designed for a wide range of uses, from delivering low-resolution web content to broadcasting HD and beyond, to near-lossless studio editing.' Now a stable version of the dirac-research codebase, Dirac 1.0.0, has been released. The BBC have already successfully used the new codec during the Beijing Olympics and are looking to push it to more general use throughout the organisation. The latest version of VLC (the recently released 0.9.2) has support for Dirac using the Schroedinger library."

JoeBorn writes "VideoLAN has long been known as a mature open source project for video playback and transcoding on the PC. Now, Neuros and Texas Instruments have sponsored a port of VLC to their next generation open set-top box. The idea is to allow developers to easily create interesting plug-ins for recording and transcoding applications for the set-top box which will automate functions previously requiring a PC, like formating recordings for a portable player or streaming to another device on the LAN or the Internet, etc."

mrcgran asks: "I have been trying to find the best solution to transfer VHS tapes to a digital format using Free Software only. I would like to lose as little as possible in the conversion, sampling optimally, minimizing noise and being in control of every step of the process. Storage is not a problem. I'm expecting to use around 5GB+ for each hour of raw captured footage." If you were going to build a VHS capture system using Free Software, how would you do it?

The software part seems promising: VLC and mencoder for conversion of raw footage, Cinelerra and many others for video editing.

However, the hardware is being tricky. Most try to bloat the device adding functions like TV/compression/edition instead of focusing on the raw A/D conversion. Chipsets are hidden, and parameters like signal-to-noise, sampling rate etc are unavailable for comparison. Information is scattered and very difficult to find.

Which chipsets/products should I look for, specially for use with Linux and BSD? Which ones allow oversampling of pixel resolution and number of frames (in order to average the values and reduce the noise)? Which setup should I use: S-Video/Composite, sampling rate/oversampling, suggestions on high-quality VHS players/heads/tape cleaning processes, etc? Has anyone tried to use scaling algorithms such as hq/scalenx to upscale video and sound resolution? Pitfalls?"

h2g2bob writes "VideoLAN yesterday released a new version of VLC media player. A shout out goes to ffmpeg for many of the codec improvements." From the blurb: "Building on feedback from the 29 million downloads of VLC media player 0.8.5, we bring you version 0.8.6 with many bugfixes, as well as a couple of new features we think you will truly enjoy. Most prominent are probably Windows Media Video 9 and Flash Video. Other important changes are improved H.264 decoding, better Windows Unicode support, a Fullscreen controller, and Apple Remote support for Mac OS X."

mctk writes "This new release features many improvements including a new VLC cone, new Mac OS X wizard and extend controls dialogs, tree playlist skins2 support, HTTP interface CGI handling, linux binary codecs loader, UPnP and Bonjour service discovery, shoutcast stream forwarding, new languages... Have a look here for the full list of changes. Binary packages and the source code are available on the VLC download page." Always been one of my favorites on any platform.

mctk writes "This new release features many improvements including a new VLC cone, new Mac OS X wizard and extend controls dialogs, tree playlist skins2 support, HTTP interface CGI handling, linux binary codecs loader, UPnP and Bonjour service discovery, shoutcast stream forwarding, new languages... Have a look here for the full list of changes. Binary packages and the source code are available on the VLC download page." Always been one of my favorites on any platform.

tRSS points out this CNN article about the ongoing "What the Hack" gathering in the Netherlands which starts out "There are hundreds of tents on the hot and soggy campground, but this isn't your ordinary summertime outing, considering that it includes workshops with such titles as 'Politics of Psychedelic Research' or 'Fun and Mayhem with RFID.'" Read on for news from this weekend's other major hacker gatherings, namely (drumroll, please) The Gathering and DefCon. From Las Vegas, giucmo writes "The Hacker Jeopardy crew are sending images and video live from DefCon to a moblog at textamerica.com Last night they captured the lights going out in a tent full of hackers. Tonight is the main event." And sysrec writes "I've been to an even number of defcon's greater than 3 and wanted to share some personal insights from the largest hacker con in the world." (Largest, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder.)

Jumping back to Europe, Late writes "The Assembly 2005 demoparty, possibly the largest in the world, is taking place in Helsinki, Finland. As I write this the best compos are still to come and you can view them and a lot more live via the AssemblyTV streams (we use VideoLAN.org's VLC media player). If you do miss the compos, the entries will be available for download from our mirrors and as video clips from the AssemblyTV media gallery."

Elliot Shepherd writes "According to John Batelle, on Monday Google is launching in-browser video playback based on VLC. Google has been accepting video uploads in April, including allowing the video owner to specify that payment is required, through the Google Payment Program." Update: 06/27 22:21 GMT by T : An anonymous reader writes "Google Video is now up. The about page describes what kinds of content has been uploaded to their servers so far -- mostly a random assortment of stuff from Gamespot's archives, a few things from Greenpeace, a Google recruiting video, some breakdancing videos, and other randomness. The in-browser video plugin works seamlessly (although Windows only for now). Looks like it has potential." Check the top entry on Google Blog for a few more words on it, too.

CaptScarlet22 writes " VideoLAN is seriously threatened by software patents due to the numerous patented techniques it implements and uses. Also threatened are the many libraries and projects which VLC is built upon, like FFmpeg, and the other fellow Free And Open Source software multimedia players, which include MPlayer, xine, Freevo, MythTV, gstreamer."

CaptScarlet22 writes " VideoLAN is seriously threatened by software patents due to the numerous patented techniques it implements and uses. Also threatened are the many libraries and projects which VLC is built upon, like FFmpeg, and the other fellow Free And Open Source software multimedia players, which include MPlayer, xine, Freevo, MythTV, gstreamer."

SimCityHippy wrote to us with the news that TiVo has TiVo To Go. Right now, the To Go feature is supported only on Windows XP & Win2k; no word on whether the feature will be rolled out to OS X or WinME. It's also interesting to note that while they recommend Windows MP, VLC gets a nod as well.

Ravalox writes "AA Helper Library, which is a set of libraries to assist in the development of AA-Lib games/applications, has made its initial release. It currently provides a few graphics primitives and a render-to-frame function so you can get a normal image out of AA-Lib. If like me you are an ascii video fan another helpful ascii library is libcaca which is currently supported in Video Lan Media Player and Mplayer."

An anonymous reader writes "The first Open Source Awards 2004 have been announced. These newly created awards aspire to be the Nobel Prizes of the open source world. Congratulations to the developers of Valgrind, VideoLAN, JACK, and Pango."

prostoalex writes "Some ads made by world's leading advertising agencies for well-known brands will never be seen in the United States. The Gucci G-Spot turned out to be too risque, video for Drug-Free America was deemed too disgusting, Internet's favorite Honda "Cog" commercial won't air due to the high prices for a 2-minute spot, and Japanese commercials with American actors have contracts preventing the companies to run the same ads in the US. AdAge provides a link to the pictures and video (Windows Media .ASF format, alas) of the 10 best unaired commercials." I can get the ASFs working under VLC.

obirt writes "A G5 firmware update provides changes for initializing and running your Power Mac G5. It provides some performance improvements for some PCI-X configurations, patches a security hole and improves fan behavior in Open Firmware." sandrift writes "Software Update just popped up with a new version of the Apple Remote Desktop Client; the version 1.2.4 update delivers improvements to security, performance, and reliability of the Apple Remote Desktop 1.2 client software running on Mac OS X versions 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3." ARD Client is included with Mac OS X 10.3. tdemark writes "MPEG-2 decoding is not supported by default in QuickTime; it is added by purchasing an additional component. Those of us that have this component discovered that it stopped working as of yesterday; it will not run after December 14, 2003. The suggested workaround is to set your clock back. VideoLAN can also be used in emergencies while Apple fixes the issue."

thedj_sd writes "As the true slashdot reader you just love ascii art of course. You have toyed around with aalib or maybe you use it all the time to watch your pr0n :) Well VLC media player's senior developer sam was bored some time ago and created libcaca. The Colour AsCii Art library of which he himself says: 'I am perfectly aware that libcaca is the waste of time it looks to be. No need to tell me about that.' But you just can't help looking at that beautiful picture of Stitch, and Doom in coloured ascii is da bomb. It works on dos/windows, Linux and Mac OS X and there is a VLC plugin and SDL backend available."

thedj_sd writes "As the true slashdot reader you just love ascii art of course. You have toyed around with aalib or maybe you use it all the time to watch your pr0n :) Well VLC media player's senior developer sam was bored some time ago and created libcaca. The Colour AsCii Art library of which he himself says: 'I am perfectly aware that libcaca is the waste of time it looks to be. No need to tell me about that.' But you just can't help looking at that beautiful picture of Stitch, and Doom in coloured ascii is da bomb. It works on dos/windows, Linux and Mac OS X and there is a VLC plugin and SDL backend available."

marXian writes "Opening in Norwich UK this week and subsequently visiting Cambridge is makb3th from theatre company pirateutopia.org. The show is very much Linux-powered using aalib, XDirectFB, VLC and more to set the piece (an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth) on an off-shore data haven." Allright, pick your jaw up off the floor ;)

javilon noted that a new DVD Player for Linux has appeared, and this one supports CSS and is the first player to implement menus. It's called Ogle and is developed by a few students at Chalmers University of Technology ins Sweden. It's really exciting to see several different groups independently and together developing players. The only question is when will the MPAA give up?

javilon writes "libdvdcss is the cross-platform library used by vlc, the VideoLAN Client, to access DVDs with transparent CSS decryption. It is the first library based on the vlc codebase, but others are planned. VideoLAN is a project of students from the École Centrale, Paris. Coming from a research background they could have some legal coverage to fight the RIAA in France. " VLC is currently the best DVD player for Linux. apt-get install vlc-gtk for you deb heads. Check it out. It's not 100%, but its pretty damn good.

Gather round kids and let me tell you a story. A story of "Convergence": a nasty buzzword many of us have dreampt of in hot lusty dreams that we wouldn't admit to our mothers. The dream is the borged media box: combining the functionality of your Tivo, your MP3 Box, DVD Player, CD Player, and so much more. It's not here yet despite lots of trying, but its getting closer.

If your closet looks anything like mine, its full of stereo equipment. Some obsolete (VCR?), and some of it is critical to survival (Tivo). But the stack of components are seperate devices which provide flexibility, but are unable to integrate cleanly into each other. What I'm describing here is The Dream. A simple box that can fulfill the tasks of my tuner, reciever, CD Player, and has a ton of new tricks that nobody has done yet.

As always, I'm looking at this through the eyes of an open source hacker. Where possible I mention projects that could provide a framework. And I also make a huge assumption about disk space. Right now 80 gig hard drives are available for only a few hundred dollars. But since it'll be years before this box really exists, we will presumably have hundreds of gigs at our disposal. When we cross 500 gigs, things get interesting... we suddenly can store a few hundred movies... a month of TV... a few months of your favorite radio broadcasts... all in one beautiful box. This project could certainly be done on windows, but ideally it wouldn't matter, since most people would never see the underlying OS, and besides, the massaging of closed source applications to fit within this framework wouldn't be possible.

Devices

The most important devices are those that are already critical in a stereo today. We need to build upon that base before we can really start breaking new ground. That said, first and foremost, we must have a CD Player. But not just any CD Player, this CD Player should automatically rip every CD you insert and store it in Ogg Vorbis, ideally at a high bit trate. While programs like Grip and FreeAmp provide an excellent foundation, the interfaces to each will need work to fit within the Borg Box.

Why stop with a CD? We have to dedicate the physical space to read discs, lets include a DVD Player. VideoLAN has a pretty solid player for Linux now. But why stop there? Like our music, we should automatically rip, catalog, and store our DVDs. This should be optional of course because the disc space required to store DVDs is going to be fairly huge. But imagine if the last 20 DVDs you watched were stored on this box? It might take 50 gigs to store at a good compression rate, but when your buddy comes over you could quickly show him that scene you mentioned the other day without rummaging through that pile of DVDs and CDs that inevitably accumulates on top of every flat surface without 5 feet of your stereo. And in 3 years, that terebyte disc may be real. And since the player is purely a software thing, Dolby Digital, DTS 5.1, and future 6.1, 7.2, and whatever else comes next could be provided with a software upgrade (unlike today where you may need a new DVD Player or Reciever)

The DVD storage leads me into what is the new essential video component: Tivo . Anyone who uses a Personal Video Recorder for more then a few weeks knows that going back is just not an acceptable solution. Tivo simply makes TV tolerable again. But Tivo has its problems. We need bigger hard drives and more storage. The Tivo interface breaks down as the number of programs increase: the 35 Hour DirecTivo model becomes unmanagable when you have 60-70 shows on it. What happens when we can stick a half a TB of disc space on this? But afaik, no open source application duplicates the functionality of the Tivo.

We should include a Tuner as well, but I'd like it to be able to play a few tricks that most can't. I enjoy listening to Howard Stern in the morning. So my mega media box should start recording it at 6am. And the audio it records should be indexed nicely with the other audio we have. Audio compresses extremely well so we could keep a lot of it around. Recording a 5 hour radio show is only going to be a few hundred megs. I've seen bits and pieces of this software in place, but with Tuner cards available for less then a hundred bucks, this should be a negligible addition. The real effort will be the programming, but since we're already doing much of these things already, it shouldn't be that hard: The PVR will need the ability to record time/date, so radio stations could simply be extra channels. And the audio stuff already is encoding CDs, and providing a nice interface for selecting music. It won't be as simple since most radio stations won't have accesible "Guides" for what is on when, but we could make do with simple time/duration/station.

While we're at it, users with high enough bandwidth should be able to stream audio and video from the net. URLs are just channels and stations. A nice internal list of popular sources of content would be a nice start. This won't matter today, but as broadband becomes the norm, web based TV should start not sucking.

We'll also need to provide a few inputs for other devices. The real trick here is that since we're going to want to do things like crossfading and overlaying audio, so these will be hard to do. Honestly, with all the devices that this box has, hopefully we wouldn't need more then 2 spare inputs, but that is a big issue that remains to be seen.

Wishes I'd love to see a version with an integrated DirecTV reciever (ala the DirecTivo which has some really great features, but no traditional cable tuner which really sucks). But that is a very difficult step and don't see that happening in any sort of open source project, so this may be an unattainable dream for our Borg Box.

A version capable of being a Cable Modem would be awesome. The cable company could make some serious bread selling something like this. They are already leasing Cable Modems and Digital Cable boxes. This would cost far more, but they could also charge a lot more for the huge gain in functionality. But imagine plugging this in to your cable jack, and being done. DHCP handles the net connection. Digital Cable. Its all done. DSL for those folks would be nice too, but you'd still need a cable input for video.

X10 Control would be sweet as well. Then events could be raised to do anything that X10 can do. The doorbell could trigger the front door camera, and change the video source to the camera by the front door (the X10 devices to do this security stuff is only a hundred bucks, so its not cost prohibitive). There are countless nifty things that you could do, and the only cost to the box is a few dollar firecracker to broadcast and recieve X10 signals, plus code to configure simple event handling. And that would be the ahrd part: coding a clean and flexible X10 system would be tricky work.

De-Interlacers are somewhat expensive devices that could probably be reasonably implemented as part of the playback. I'm sure it wouldn't be as top notch as a dedicated processor or high end progressive DVD Player, but it seems like this could be done nicely, and then we could pull one more component out of the chain. I suspect doing a good job with this would quickly become clock cycle consuming. Maybe co-processors could be employed for the job. This would only affect HDTV users, although in 18 months, that might be the majority of users for this device. Lets face it, this thing is going to be high tech, and the mainstream isn't even ready for Tivo yet!

New Tricks A phone jack will be necessary for a variety of purposes (CD Lookups, TV Guide Information) for users without ethernet access to the world. Why not rig it up to allow notification of phone calls? You're watching a movie and the phone rings. The audio fades, and optionally the video pauses. A window pop's up and tells you who the call is from. Festival could even say it out loud.

Since we'll have a net connection, various reports could easily be generated. Some things could be snarfed automatically. Perl modules exist to get things like weather, stock quotes, and status of your pop mail. I'd love to wake up, press a button, and hear "Its 65 degrees and sunny with 10 mph wind from the northwest. LNUX is trading at 12 cents a share. And you have 1092 messages waiting". Well, I'd like it better if those last 2 numbers were switched, but you get the point. Advanced users could code simply scripts to acquire new information making the options limitless: Traffic reports ("It will take you 12 hours to get to work because you live in California dumbass") and any compliant rss website could give you news headlines. Couple that with X10, and you could make it so a motion sensor triggers your report. Add bounds for time. If the borg box detects motion between 8am and 10am in the living room, give the morning weather report. Suddenly, you have the report as you're getting your keys and wallet, and know without even looking outside if you need your coat.

While we're at it, why not provide an alarm clock? Its easy, but overlooked. Your alarm could be your customized news report I mentioned above, your favorite morning radio show (starting at the beginning, and not at 7:45 during the middle of that annoying commercial for the head shop), or your choice of obnoxiously loud ringing tones guaranteed to raise the dead.

Since all the devices are integrated, we have a variety of controls available that most recievers don't have. We could crossfade one device into another. I know its picky, but hey, it sure would be cool. You could fade the radio volume 50% to get your caller ID spoken to you. Its the little details that would really make this stand out.

Interaction The real trick is going to be the interface. If I tell my amazing media box that I'm interested in Tenchi, it should be able to provide me with the Tenchi Soundtrack that I ripped. The Tenchi DVDs I watched a few weeks ago (and if its not on the hard drive, it could at least remember what I watched and when). And the episodes that have aired recently on Cartoon Network. And since we have a net connection, why not search Napster, Gnutella, and Google? There's a plethora of solid sources of multi media out there. The real trick is going to be providing a clean interface for picking what it is your want. The UI will provide you with key information. Icons representing local media, media you've already seen, DVDs you have but maybe haven't ripped, things that could be streamed, things that are coming soon. But it can't be overly complicated (by default. There always should be advanced options).

Actually communicating with the device should be available on many levels. A simple remote control for the bulk of normal everyday functions: Play. Pause. Fast Forward. Menu Navigation. "I Like This Thing I am Seeing, so show me more like this in the future". A wireless keyboard should be an option too. With this GUI, more complex features would be available: writing perl scripts, typing in more complex search requests.

Someday voice interaction would be excellent as well, but thats a bit off yet. Today's voice recognition is not up to the task of taking commands from a room full of ambient noise: it simply can't figure out when it is being addressed. But its not far off. "Borg Box, Good Morning" could be the trigger for your morning weather report. "Borg Box, Good Night" changes to a play list containing mellow Brian Eno tracks. Can you imagine? It sounds like the high tech star trek stuff, but the parts are all getting really close.

Hardware Interfaces Ideally we would provide component video with options for 480i for backwards compatibility, and 480p at the minimum for HDTV. If we could do 780p, we could provide a very crisp video signal, and make a lot of nifty things possible, like fitting sharper smaller fonts on screen. Maybe a VGA adapter too. We could probably do this the same way the Playstation 2 does: a nice little dongle gives us all the options necessary even for older sets, without cluttering the actual device.

Audio should by default come out via optical toslink cable. Admittedly, many recievers don't support that, but backwards compatibility to to channel RCA stereo plugs would be nice. Surround sound would only be available through the optical channels, just as the PS/2 operates today. We won't make the mistake that the DirecTivo does of only sending the principle signal to the optical port, and only mixing in other effects to the RCA ports.

Obviously we will need a phone jack for primitive net access, and for phone functions. But also an ethernet port for the lucky folks with DSL, Cable, or real network connections.

We'll need a cable jack. Ideally it could handle Cable Modem input, Digital Cable Input, and just plain old cable. But for starters, just cable is enough. If cable companies participate, a lof of magic is possible.

An IR port could provide input for a remote control and a full blown wireless keyboard. The keyboard could be sold seperate to keep costs down if necessary, but wireless input is cheap, as are remotes.

We probably also should have power too, although a future version should also include a cold fusion module so that this box can power your house as well. Hey, we're dreaming, why not go all out ;)

Costs Expensive. We're talking thousands of dollars for this hardware. And who knows how many hours for the software. Much of the functionality I've described already exists in various forms, but writing a consistant, well designed UI requires rare skills in the open source world. And a device like this is almost entirely about the UI. Many Slashdot readers could build this box, but its going to take special people to actually make the UI friendly enough to gain mass acceptance.

Costs could potentially be taken on a bit by Cable companies leasing these an alternative to cable boxes/cable modems. Since they already lease those for 5 bucks a month each, customers are used to it. And this provides the functionality of a thousand dollars worth of hardware.

Adversiting is also a huge potential revenue stream. Yes its annoying, but if it meant you could get this box for $1000, would it be worth it? Personally I'm all for highly targetted advertising. If I search for Tenchi, my ad should be about anime. While the banner ad market is poop, this kind of targetting could be hugely valuable. Cartoon Network runs hundreds of ads a week for anime, but they are preaching to the converted: you're already watching their network when you see this ad. This method could get anime fans who maybe didn't realize that Big O is running on Cartoon Network, and is a really excellent show worth watching. You may have a lot of anime DVDs, and not know Cartoon Network's lineup changed. And nothing irritates me more then mismarketing. If I am alone in my basement, I should never ever ever see an add for feminine hygiene products. I will never purchase them. They wasted their advertising dollar and my time. Its one step away from telemarketers interupting me and my pizza.

Ideally you can build the box yourself, choosing the functionality you want and need (Don't want a tuner? click a checkbox during install, save $100 on the tuner card). The most expensive part would probably be the hard drives. Right now, 2 80 gig hard drives would be the best place to start, and thats going to run $500. The PC might only run another 500, but we'll need things like a Tuner, an mpeg encoder and decoder, a DVD Player. Ideally sources exist for getting a pre-fabbed box. I don't think my dad wants to build his own, but he sure loves his tivo.

Conclusion People talk so much about the inevitable convergence of all media. But it sure is taking a long time. The device I describe is an undertaking on the scale of a project like the kernel or GNOME. So many bits and pieces of the puzzle are available: we have IR reading software, rippers, mpeg encoders and decoders. Its just a matter of time before someone puts the parts together. It could be built using GPLd parts, but if nobody does it, it won't be. Many companies have started down this road: Indrema bottomed out, Tivo sales continue to be lackluster, ZapStation will most likely never ship anything more then a press release. But none of them have truly addressed the big picture... I only have time to talk about it. Does anyone have the time to actually do it?