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TheKompany Releases DivX Software For Zaurus
An anonymous reader writes: "InfoSync has an article on DivX for the Zaurus. Finally, you can watch movies on the go!" Between this and theKompany's ogg player, the Zaurus looks cool. It's a little chunkier perhaps, but another reader points out that Archos is now taking pre-orders for its do-everything Jukebox Multimedia device, which might be another option for those seeking a portable anything box.
here
Link to OpenDivX for Zaurus
A compact flash card on a zarous could hold about 2 full movies with good compression. I have a 320 mb card and could easily fit 2 movies. Hence not just for trailers who woould watch trailers. GRRRRRRRR i dislike you evil man.
Dan Mayer: my blog, essays, art, etc
i never did get why a divx player wasnt ported from any other linux project. i don't know much about the Zaurus, but it should be able to handle a standard X app, shouldn't it? If not, it uses java, right? Wouldn't it be technically possible to write a divx player in java? Either way, we shouldn't be charging for this shit. Just look to DCDivX for an example of an embedded dreamcast player.
Kazaa for PDAs?
Only problem is HD size.. if a DIVX movie is huge, seems like you can't fit very much on one small PDA...
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
Ummm...let's not forget that it has a builtin compact flash and SD slot in that footprint, shall we? How big do the other guys get when you add the special sleeves and adapters to do that? Not to mention the integrated keyboard.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I saw bourne-identity listed in the playlist on the picture. Has this movie been released on DVD yet?
It seems like everyone in the world, particularly the US and Japan, is looking towards more and more sensory overload for happiness. I mean, seriously, do we need a cell phone, PDA, pager, and a DivX player all vying for our attention every moment of our day? Will this make us any happier, or will it push us further into becoming the attention-less, cynical pricks we silently feel ourselves becoming?
All these stimuli are really going to do a number on us in the long run, mark my words. I fear for two generations from now, who will grow up in a world of stimulation we can't even currently dream of.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
This is just the thing for a small portable sales demo tool. It has one of the best screens.
Get a free ipod.
Let's see - the Zaurus offers 32megs of storage. Extend that to 256 if you buy an expensive CF card. That's nothing compared to the 700 megs of a typical DivX movie.
Now, if you really want to watch movies on your Zaurus during a flight, you'll have to export nfs shares from your laptop, and have the zaurus connect to it (everything on top of 802.11b, that's cooler that way).
Apart from watching pr0n during a meeting/flight, what is the point ?
mmmhhhh, just checked out the
specs a bit and this thing
features a ridiculous 1.5"
237 x 234 pixels screen....
that thing should have a
800x600 minimum resolution
screen taking up the whole
back, so it could be used
as a portable picture book
as well...
chees 1.5", my digicam has a
bigger one....
I've noticed that theKompany's got the best Zaurus software, but they don't offer demos on anything. Does anybody know why? Particularly on a device like the Z, where there is effectively no commercial competition, I'd like to be able to evaluate their software before I buy it. After all, it could stink, who would know? Not saying it does, just saying that unlike in the Palm world, for instance, theKompany doesn't have 10 competitors breathing down its neck and making sure the quality stays high.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
What better use could a device like this provide than streaming video over it's 802.11b connection? Not sure why I would want they but it sounds like a good idea.
Anyone have expierience with battery time using a 802.11b connection for something like that? I keep getting more and more reasons I want one of those SL-5500 things. I would probably only use it for each of those reasons once though...
What's the killer "keep using it" app for these?
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Here is a Mplayer-Zaurus Howto
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
Anyone who misspells 'their' should be dragged out into the street and shot.
"One second. Friends is almost over."
=-Jippy
Anyone who thinks people should be dragged out into the street and shot should be dragged out into the street and shot.
Yikes, that's me too! Let me rephrase that....
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
being playing divx on my ipaq for ages..
:)
take a look at BBPlay.
Open source divx player
Works fine for me and should work on the zaurus (same cpu)
You can find them in Circuit City. They're those $120 ones everyone can afford. You know, unless they've got this thing about spending $120 on something that holds less than .3% of what the larger versions of storage will hold for the same price.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
If the colour LCD screens are now good enough to handle "movies", these PDAs would make a handy portable TV receiver too. That would also open up a whole new market segment for these currently "geeky" gadgets: the consumers.
PDA-with-TV&Tivo-in-your-pocket?
What pieces are still missing until that can happen?
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
I spelled it correctly, then changed it back to the way I like to spell it, because I realized, that I don't need to conform to the traditional spellings of the work thier. But yes, I agree I should be dragged out into the street and shot.
Shudder.. I hope this is not a trend..
=-Jippy
You can look at it here
I didn't realize that Krispy Kreme was a tech company.
But then, I eat at Tim Horton's.
~Idarubicin
mpeg_encoding_howto
Enjoy
Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
It's been a trend for awhile. Remember "Mortal Kombat? Around where I live there are a bunch of "Kwik Kar Wash"es. Then again, thats nothing compared to the "1337 H4x0rZ" out there. :P
Battery life has to improve drastically (currently about 2 hours in developer's model)
Standard apps (calendar/address book) need to be as good as the standard ones available on Palm
Without those basics, the 'Wow' applications make neat demos, but won't win market share.
Subscribers can see articles in the future? So what? Everyone gets to see them in the future.
url: http://kirk.math.twsu.edu/family/james/mplayer.htm l
While consumer-level services that use Linux on the backend are well established, with examples such as Google and Amazon, consumer products are just now showing their colors.
Everyone loves their TiVo, a device that makes TV worth watching, and the Zaurus has reached a critical mass where there is enough mindshare to facilitate the development of tons of great custom software for the Linux based PDA. So what will we see next? I think that it would be nice to see the Zaurus technology used in a mobile phone.
For many, PDAs are great, but for most, PDAs take a backseat to their mobile phone. Why not cut the chase and combine the two?
I don't know about The Kompany in particular, but usually it has to do with guaranteeing trademarkability of your name. Anything that is sufficiently arbitrary is trademarkable, so the idea is to come up with something that is arbitrary enough to be undisputably trademarkeable, and at the same time try to create an association with something specific in the mind of the person reading it.
I took some intellectual property law classes when I was still in school in hopes that it would help me know what to steer clear of when working with open source, and software in general. One week our homework every night was to come up with 10 company or product names that were sufficiently arbitrary to be trademarkeable, yet still understandable. We then spent the class time that week trying to "overturn" the other student's trademarks. $1900 in credits well spent. (Well, it was better then the environmental law class. I don't know what I was thinking taking that one.)
Interesting idea: combine open 802.11b network with local hard drive full of multimedia content connected to it.
Imagine having a spare hour to kill waiting for class. You walk on over to the nearest dorm, boot up your slick PDA / laptop and check the ether for some movies to keep you busy. Seems like it would have some potential.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Actually I mispelled the word "word" as "work"
>So, a company releases a proprietary DivX player
-Yes... tckPlayer is propriatary
>for a proprietary window system
-Nope... The windowing system and toolkit are GPL. For an entirely GPLed enviroment that will still run standard Zaurus apps (minus Java for now, sorry) see Opie which is the UI for OpenZaurus. We're building a player for all these formats as I type this.
>running on hardware that's mostly used in Japan
-Nope again. The Zaurus 5500 is a US/EU product.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
It could be worse. There used to be a software company called The Company. Imagine what legal contracts with them looked like.
Spelling c-words with a "k" is always a sign of quality, and calling your company "kompany" is also very clever!
Don't you mean Klassy and Klever? What about Kwality?
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
They even have RealVideo version 1 and mjpeg. Who even uses realvideo version 1, unless you encode it with ffmpeg?
I think this is more than a conincidence. I also heard the author of ffmpeg got an email that the many error codes in tkcVideo are very similiar to ffmpeg...
and there is no WAY they could have written those codecs by themselves in the short amount of time. No fuckin way...
The question is not who is willing to pay for it, the question is why this matters to anybody on Slashdot. There are plenty of proprietary DivX players around. What difference does one more make? Why is this news?
Maybe Slashdot should let people filter out announcements of non-free software--I'm really not interested.
At first I thought "what a complete waste. Cool, but useless." Then I realized, it has a very good practical use. It would be ideal for viewing training videos. The test equipment I work with is pretty complex. It'd be nice to have a small display that you could easily move around while you're watching. If your computer (laptop or desktop) is on your desk, and your equipment is in a lab, this would be much easier to move around. Just a thought before everyone says "stupid idea." (makes you wonder... posting a message saying "lame" or doing something cool but preceived as lame. I wonder which is actually useless.)
Get a grip man!
Death to all extremists!
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
That sounds about as useful as a Swiss army knife that has a screwdriver, tweezers, scissors, etc. but -- oops -- doesn't have a knife blade.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The Zaurus has no built-in USB port. This is possibly the one and only reason that the Zaurus is a peice of crap, but there you have it. /talk/ to the thing*
*goes back to trying to get linux to even
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Uh... didn't The Kompany really start out focusing on KDE? Hence the _K_? :^P
Something like this:
Groucho: Now pay particular attention to this first clause, because it's most important. There's the party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part. How do you like that, that's pretty neat eh?
Chico: No, that's no good.
Groucho: What's the matter with it?
Chico: I don't know, let's hear it again.
Groucho: So the party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part.
Chico: Well it sounds a little better this time.
Groucho: Well, it grows on you. Would you like to hear it once more?
Chico: Just the first part.
Groucho: What do you mean, the party of the first part?
Chico: No, the first part of the party of the first part.
Groucho: All right. It says the first part of the party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the first part of the party of the first part, shall be known in this contract - look, why should we quarrel about a thing like this, we'll take it right out, eh? [rip]
Chico: Yes, it's too long anyhow. Now what have we got left?
Groucho: Well I've got about a foot and a half.
Groucho: Now what's the matter?
Chico: I don't like the second part either. Hey look, why can't the first part of the second party be the second part of the first party, then you've got something.
Groucho: Well look, rather than go through all that again, what do you say?
Chico: Fine. [rip]
Groucho: Now I've got something here you're bound to like, you'll be crazy about it.
Chico: No, I don't like it.
Groucho: You don't like what?
Chico: Whatever it is, I don't like it.
Groucho: Well don't let's break up an old friendship over a thing like that. Ready?
Chico: OK. [rip] Now the next part I don't think you're going to like.
Groucho: Well your word's good enough for me. [rip] Now then, is my word good enough for you?
Chico: I should say not.
Groucho: Well I'll take out two more clauses. [rip][rip] Now the party of the eighth part --
Chico: No, that's no good, no.
Groucho: [rip]The party of the ninth part --
Chico: No, that's no good too. Hey, how is it my contract is skinnier than yours?
Groucho: Well, I don't know, you must have been out on a tail last night. But anyhow, we're all set now, are we? Now just you put your name right down there, then the deal is legal.
Chico: I forgot to tell you, I can't write.
Groucho: Well that's all right, there's no ink in the pen anyhow. But listen, it's a contract isn't it? We've got a contract, no matter how small it is.
Chico: Oh sure. You bet.
Yeah, they did.
Actually, it makes sense for them (a bunch of KDE developers) to write stuff for the Zarus, since it runs QT/Embedded.
Easy way to branch into a new market, it seems.
I think I need a new sig here.
I wouldn't even pay for it for $15 no matter how many features it has. I'd wait for the new Opie player. tkc apps are nice, but some of them, I believe are overpriced.
Alea jacta est!
I think this is more than a conincidence. I also heard the author of ffmpeg got an email that the many error codes in tkcVideo are very similiar to ffmpeg...
Ok, yes, you're probably right, it probably does use ffmpeg. What's the big deal? As you point out, ffmpeg is LGPL'ed, which allows proprietary applications to link to it. Any modifications they make to ffmpeg would have to be released, but I'm betting they had to make zero, zilch, none. A Zaurus is just a fairly typical ARM Linux system. As long as they're using a standard shared library version of ffmpeg, supply a copy of the LGPL somewhere, and give credits to ffmpeg in the about box and a pointer to where the LGPL is, they are in the clear. That's not really asking a lot. If they do this, they don't even have to provide ffmpeg source. At least, this is how I and quite a few people read the LGPL.
The LGPL is quite a different beast to the GPL, and that's by design.
Do you know anything about Java 2D? Java 3D?
What you Anti-Java people know is "Java is slow."
When did you last visited Sun's site and learned about the latest improvements in JIT compilers etc?
Do you have a Zaurus and tested Java on Zaurus?
Stop showing degree of your idiocy and spreading Java FUD.
Idiot.
Dear Bill, do you have a
Does anybody have any details of the levels of performance (frame rate, etc.) of this player on the Zaurus? I've seen DivX players for other PDAs that play at 6fps, which means you only get to see 1/4 of a film!
Yes. And writing apps for QT/E is very similar to writing apps for KDE. Same widgets, same languages, etc.
~GoRK