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Nokia Media Terminal
A reader writes: "Nokia has announced an media terminal at IBC'2000 (International Broadcasting Convention, Amsterdam) which seems to be a serious competitor for the home. It includes DVB receiver, x86 PC hardware running Linux & XFree. The hardware supports also recording the TV stream to the hard disk (TiVo functionality) and
other cool stuff."
What is a DVB?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
This thing definately looks cool, and I'm sure I'll have at least one in my house...
However, it seems that homes really need to be networked first to make things like this _really_ usefull. This would be great as a kitchen station, or bedroom station to supplement a main PC, but very few homes have the infrastructure to support this kind of thing.
Wireless sucks, especially considering the price. Until we can get 25Mbps wireless LANS for less than $40/node (with decent anti-snooping measures) wireless is just another toy.
-This sig intentionally left blank
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Anybody know when these things will be actually available?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
How exactly would Nokia be hurt by competitors putting prices up? They would just walk off with the market... More likely is that there would be a price war and a few companies retire hurt, with the remaining ones putting up prices - however, price wars can't go on too long, and are hardly a reason to wish for less competition...
Convergence is happening, whether you like it or now - in other words, market boundaries are becoming much less distinct as companies find there's technology and maybe even demand for a box that can play games, show digital TV, surf the Net, etc.
This thing looks like an attempt to combine the functions of Tivo, WebTV, DirecTV, Diamond Rio, and Playstation. I love my Swiss Army knife, but each of its many tools are poor substitutes for those made specifically for a given purpose; I'm guessing that the Nokia Media Terminal is probably the same. While it might be better than nothing at all and provide some basic level of these sort of services, I suspect that people wanting serious functionality in one or more of these areas will become dissatisfied pretty fast.
and manage to make it look like a very high tech toaster. Now nokia release a set-top breadbin. What next the Microsoft X-Box Waffle Iron?
What is it with these design types and bandwagons?
Bob.
If this really is to take off for the average guy, it might be worthwhile to add a DVD player to the mix (you would just need a pc DVD drive and possibly a hardware decoder). With that, you could get away without a VCR. You can tape broadcast and rent movies. Without DVD capability, you still need a separate VCR or DVD to watch rentals.
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
Don't we have these now? I call mine a "computer".
:)
(And mine has better processor stats...
Vulgrin the MAD
I sig, therefore I am.
Ericsson already announced a mobile media terminal based on Linux. It will be available around the end of the year. It will use Opera as browser, but will not be based on X but instead use Qt embedded. It will also include a phone and Bluetooth connectivity.
Is this the first one of these pseudo-computer devices with an optional 10/100 ethernet adapter? I sure do hope this is a trend. I'd like to see ethernet available on all of these devices.
--- "1.21 Jigawatts!" -Doc
Anybody have any sources on how they did this?
I see a lot of comments comparing this to WebTV, and rightly so. Having worked there and now working at Nokia ( but it is a big company and it is the first time I have seen this 'appliance') I have to wonder how this is going to shake out.
Nokia has been very successful in the cell phone market since they are providing the right piece of the puzzle - the sleek phone that everybody loves, and leaving all the messy customer relations to the mobile phone service providers. The question is whether that approach will work for the emerging television/web convergence market.
The pioneer of this market, WebTV decided a long time ago that the money to be made is in the subscription to services, and not in selling the hardware itself. There is a subsidy given to the licensees of the WebTV hardware, so what you pay for a WebTV box is really not what it costs to make. The hope is that the subsidy will be made up in future subscription revenues. Fine if every body signs up for the WebTV service, but what frequently happens is that WebTV box you bought for Great Uncle Elmer's Christmas present is still sitting in the box since he is unsure how to hook up all of those cables. No hook-up, no subscription revenue stream.
WebTV's approach is a lot like the razor manufacturer that gave away razors so that you would buy their replacement razor blades, the profit being in the selling of the blades. Nokia seems to think that they can profit from the selling of the shavers, and giving the profits from the replacement blades to someone else. Good luck.
I do have to commend Nokia for embracing Open Standards though. WebTV was acquired by M$ and a lot of changes were imposed that did not work out.
There are a lot of Linux and *nix friendly prople there; they were still using Linux for hardware bringup when I left there. When we were told that the client OS was going to be WinCE, the developers soon were in the habit of squinting and gritting their teeth while saying "wince" whenever they mentioned the OS's name. Nice thing about Open Systems is that if it doesn't do what you want it to do, you open up the source code and code it yourself. With a proprietary OS, even in the mother company, you submit your ECRs(Engineering Change Requests) and wait for it to work its way through the system and pray that it did not get too mangled after those dozen planning meetings before it finally gets assigned to someone to code.
Yep, you heard it, this device uses Mozilla to render pages (or probably more likely just the gecko core functionality.)
Makes you wonder why all these people have been saying Mozilla is dead, Mozilla sucks, Mozilla is bloated. A non-released product chosen over IE as an embedded browser is certainly not going to die very soon.
Yep, this very page was posted with the 2000090604 nightly. And we are rapidly approaching M18 (perhaps even today.) Of course we'll get there sooner if you pop over onto irc.mozilla.org and join #mozillazine and start squashing bugs.
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Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
marotti.com
Nokia has announced an media terminal at IBC'2000 (International Broadcasting Convention, Amsterdam) which seems to be a serious competitor for the home.
I think I'll stick with my home. Even though this media terminal is a "serious competitor" for my home, my home stores a lot more stuff, and allows me to live inside of it.
...end of transmission...
We definitely need an icon for Nokia!
They don't have to distribute the source until they start distributing the binaries. AFAIK no one has one yet.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
Note the following bit of the Netscape Public License:
Note the phrase may license such additional products on different terms from those contained in this License.
The result is that NCC, as original "owner" of the code base, has arranged that they may license the code to other people on other bases.
Nokia could get the code under the MPL; that would indeed require that they contribute back changes in source code form. If they get the code under some other licensing arrangement, the MPL obviously doesn't apply to them.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Intel Celeron(TM) 366 MHz CPU or faster
20 GB Hard Disk or more
Support for ISDN, PSTN, xDSL or Cable modem
Accelerated 3D graphics and special effects
Conditional Access and Parental Control
Linux Operating System
Mozilla browser - enhanced for PAL/NTSC screen displays
HTML, HTTP, JavaScript, DVB and ATVEF compliant
Support for GIF, JPEG, MIDI, PDF, MACROMEDIA, etc
Don't know about you, but if it runs linux I don't think the "parental control" will be much of an impediment to some of us of the younger generation... ;-)
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
I am going to go broke fairly soon because of devices like this. One good thing is that I will not have to heat my house in the winter anymore, so I can save a little money.
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
I don't like it because it runs Linux. I think it's the first device that I've seen that can use some sort of cable modem. This sure beats a regular analog dial up modem. I still won't buy one until they support ethernet cards, though. I don't care if it's TIVO, Web TV, etc.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
I love Nokia's phones, but they don't seem so good at Digital TV set top boxes.
I unfortunately opted for a Nokia STB with my OnDigital subscription (UK terrestrial digital TV), purely on the basis of the quality of their phones. Since then I have had to reboot the machine every day or so, although some software updates seem to fix things for a while - until they add some new feature, and the whole thing becomes unstable.
I would blame OnDigital, but I heard that the much-delayed Digital Teletext service worked for ages on Philips and other makes of decoder before some hacky software work-around for all the hardware bugs was hammered out for the Nokia boxes (although I have little firm evidence for this).
I hate to think of the combination of this with the (in)famous stability of Mozilla.
This could be a godsend for those broadcasters in the USA who are having a hard time coming up with the considerable scratch needed to meet the FCC's deadlines for HDTV transmissions. Using Digital Video Broadcasting they can still create a revenue stream (info delivery) while avoiding the many equipment changes that they would have to pay for HDTV support. All they have to do is get connectivity and a digital transmitter, which they would have to purchase in any case. They drop out of the video production biz (studios, camera, lights, editing gear, etc. all have to be changed or modified to fit HDTV...) and just concentrate on delivery, and let the cable folks pick up the broadcast segement. After all, there is little broadcast penetration in major markets anyway. It is all cable.
Makes me wonder if Nokia is going to supply the back end of this. Anybody know?
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
But not with a BookPC...
I once set up a Red Hat 5.2 system running XFree to display on TV via a VGA->TV converter I bought off of Ebay. The trick was that the VGA->TV converter needed a 640x480 display, @ 60Hz (IIRC), with a 15 Khz horizontal refresh (I think - it has been a long while). Anyhow, I managed to set up X to use this funky mode, and it displayed fine on the TV. Most cheap VGA->TV converters do this (because the hardware needed to convert other modes is more expensive - RAM for a frame buffer, then scan-conversion hardware, etc). I currently have in my Suse box a Hercules Voodoo Rush card I am hoping to get working like this.
Poke around on my website - I may have the file listed, or maybe a link (look for Tomi Engdahl's site - lot's of good info there).
Unfortunately, I forgot to save my xconfig settings when I removed RedHat (I kick myself everyday for doing this!)...
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
"Boy, that sure proves that it's a conspiracy!"
On the other hand, there is a considerable Linux presence at Nokia, between the fact that:
Perhaps not "notable kernel hackers," but there certainly are a lot of engineers that use Linux...
It all goes together to imply that things are seldom as "black-and-white" as they may appear to be...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
DVB is COFDM (coded orthagonal frequency division multiplexing). Search Google for more information than you could possibly want on this format. But I'll give some here for the sake of information (no, not karma :) :
:) .
As you might know, some broadcasters have raised issues with the 8-VSB standard presently in use in the US, claiming that it does not preform suffieiently well under multipath conditions such as the inner city that residents would instead opt for cable or satellite services (it would typically be either that or getting up and readjusting the antenna every time you changed a channel). They also claim that mobile reception (i.e., walking down a sidewalk watching TV or receiving data on, e.g., the next Palm, or tuning in while on the road) is significantly more reliable with COFDM-based systems such as DVB than the 8-VSB system is (although NxtWave claimed that they could solve this problem; however nothing has come yet, and COFDM by design can naturally cope with these situations well anyway; those better informed than I can fill in here). Independant and hopefully objective tests are currently in progress in and around the Washington, D.C. metropoliton area to substantiate these claims.
This is yet another device that uses the DVB standard (which, BTW, is the standard in all but about 4 (?) other countries currently in transition to digital television; or in some cases a slightly modified standard is used). Another, also mentioned elsewhere in these comments, is the Nokia Mediascreen, a arm-held (a bit too big for hand-held) 12" TFT-display DVB reciever plus GSM phone access plus SMS plus Internet (and running Linux). I have used^H^H^H^Hplayed around with a prototype, and even if nothing else, it's cool enough to justify changing the standard just so the Europeans can't keep it for themselves
At the present, Nokia DVB products run Linux. Europeans and others privalaged with DVB television systems please show your support with your wallets (i.e., grab your Mediascreen as soon as it comes out), and US citizens... well we'll just have to wait and see how Congress reacts to the data gathered during the D.C. testing.
In case you're wondering,
There are a handful of hardware & software based DVD players for Linux. Check out these past Slashdot articles:Are There Linux DVD Players on the Market and Linux DVD hardware support from SiS.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Check Adomo.com, which makes something similar. ZDnet has an excellent article describing it.