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Ethernet MP3 Player
Erik Johansson writes: "You can now stream mp3s to your stereo, the guys at slimdevices seems to be building a bonafide ethernet mp3 player. There are some cool pictures of the soldering sweatshop, so perhaps it isn't vaporware?"
Found here (http://www.riohome.com/products/receiver.htm), the Rio Receiver does basicaly the same thing, and is already available in stores.
It also has the advantage of being able to stream over standard phone lines, for those of us who don't have cat5 strung out to the living room.
Its not easy but it can be done. If enough folks order them, however, it'll make economic sense for them to get them made in a fab facility.
And I'm sure its not a fake. Embedded devices have gotten very powerful. You can fit an entire ethernet capable Java computer with its own embedded JVM, filesystem, etc on a SIMM size card. An MP3 player that just reads a socket stream, decodes the MP3 and outputs audio is not super complex. Its not childs play but its certainly something an embedded system could do. Can't wait to get mine - gonna be fun to finally hook up my stereo to my RAID5 MP3 array :)
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Turtle Beach has the Audiotron which does the same thimg works great and can be found at some best buys for $149. I love mine.
It is certainly possible, but it's not easy. The SliMP3 firmware is, AFAIK, the only modern IP stack to have been entirely hand-coded in assembler. The hardware we're using is a PIC microcontroller, along with a custom chip (prototyped in a Xilinx CPLD) for doing DMA transfer through an SRAM to the MPEG decoder. It's a rather different design than other embedded Internet platforms - we're cranking 10Mbps through system built around a 20Mhz, 8-bit microcontroller. Of course you don't need this kind of throughput for an MPEG *audio* stream...
It would have supported OGG, had there been a low-cost chip for Ogg decoding (like the STA013 and MAS3507D for MP3).