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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.
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.
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
if you you use DivX (mpeg4) like it is supposed to and drop the bit rate down, and incode it for the size of the zaurus's screen you should be able to fit about an hour of video onto a 128mb card.
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!
The Zaurus run Linux and java...
Heres's a spec pages:
Zaurus
Also, the "dev" version have only 32meg of ram instead of 64
I'd rather be sailing...
>Extend that to 256 if you buy an expensive CF
>card.
$100 is "an expensive CF card"?
I guess when you consider the Zaurus itself is $400ish, it could be considered expensive, but...
-l
mpeg_encoding_howto
Enjoy
Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
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.)
>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.
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.
Yeah, but nowadays they're most likely to be Microdrives, which actually have platters and spin and suck your battery's life out. It'd be a race between which is finished first, the movie or the battery.
256 is *plenty* for a divx movie. Converting 640x480 to 320x240 already knocks a 700MB movie down to 175MB, no more compression required.
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.)
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.
"If a DIVX movie is huge, seems like you can't fit very much on one small PDA..."
Point taken. But there was a time when you couldn't copy a CD onto a hard drive...
Uh... didn't The Kompany really start out focusing on KDE? Hence the _K_? :^P
Well, just to play Devil's Advocate, what about wireless?
I set up a 'media server' at home which is essentially a Windows 2000 box converted into a TiVo. It captures TV at 330kbits to Windows Media 8 format that PC's, PocketPC's, and Macs can support. Eventually I'll set up a wireless network so that I can roam around with the laptop and watch video straight off that machine.
Concievably, a PocketPC would be able to do it via 802.11 as well. Unfortunately, I need a titch more processing power. A 206mhz iPaq can handle the video at 15 FPS, but not at 30. When the XScale PocketPc's come out (if they haven't already), I should be able to do just that.
Okay, I won't be watching a movie/TV at a restaruant, but any computer in my apartment would be have video on demand. I'm about $200 away from getting that working right now.
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.
Yes. And writing apps for QT/E is very similar to writing apps for KDE. Same widgets, same languages, etc.
~GoRK