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Lindows Media Computer: Power to Strike Microsoft?
Augustus writes "LinuxHardware.org has just published the first review of the Lindows Media Computer from iDOTpc.com. The review covers the hardware behind the machine but also goes through all of the machine's claimed functionality:
"After looking over all the media hype, I went searching for one of these little machines. Could the Lindows Media Computer really pull off meeting the new Windows machine in a pitched battle? It did boast "Instant on" DVD, CD, MP3, and VCD playback as one of the prime features. And, it was only a fraction of the price for a Windows Media Center system. At the time, only one vendor had them available, iDOTpc.com. After some communication, the folks at iDOTpc.com were kind enough to loan me one of the units to take for a spin." You can find the full review over at LinuxHardware.org."
iDotpc... I could've sworn I read idiot-pc there... I need more coffee...
It did boast "Instant on" DVD, CD, MP3, and VCD playback as one of the prime features
I have one of those, it's called a DVD player. RCA made them awhile ago.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Please isn't that illegal ? :-). ) . So why would he bother to switch ?>
I dont care if DMCA or DCMA or whatever is unethical or not, it it a law , which makes watching DVDs on linux illegal (the encrypted ones only).
And 99$ for one year of subscription, man at that price m$ looks like a cheap option. Don't tell me with 99$ you get a lot more than a bare bone OS.Coz a typical lindows user wont need MySQl, PGSQL, Apache, etc etc.
Is it just me, who feels that this whole concept of dumbed-down linux, rediculous ? The average joe doesn't care about GNU, GPL, free sheech/beer (well he does care about the beer
And geeks have better things to do , like build their distro from scratch than be bothered by such dumb distors
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Here's a list of the multi media players it seems they are using.
Bored with my musical endeavors, I thought it was time to watch some movies. I put in an older DVD movie, Spaceballs. It was all down hill from there. Anyone familiar with the movie will remember the opening sequence where the large spacecraft moves across the screen. The video playback was quite stuttered, though the audio did not seem to suffer. As the movie went on, the stutter wasn't as obvious but was still there. ...
First they release an AOL Computer that can't access AOL, and now they're making a Media Computer that can't play media.
Just because they're pissing off Microsoft doesn't make them a good company.
Lindows would be great if it WASN'T AS BAD AS WINDOWS! If only they would open up the source on that killer version of WINE they have to other distro's.
Not too far back, battle waged. A battle between the big man and the little man. Massive Microsoft against little Lindows. After a lengthy court battle, the little man finally prevailed. Microsoft was not able to stop them from using the Windows-like name. That was in Spring of last year. This year, Lindows decided to give Microsoft another swift kick in the pants.
Perhaps still a little haughty over their win, Lindows decided to take on another of Microsoft's products. In late 2002, Microsoft put into market the Media Center Edition of its popular Windows XP operating system, complete with system requirements dictated to OEM system builders. On January 28, 2003, Lindows released its own Lindows Media Computer as a direct competitor.
After looking over all the media hype, I went searching for one of these little machines. Could the Lindows Media Computer really pull off meeting the new Windows machine in a pitched battle? It did boast ?Instant on? DVD, CD, MP3, and VCD playback as one of the prime features. And, it was only a fraction of the price for a Windows Media Center system. At the time, only one vendor had them available, iDOTpc.com. After some communication, the folks at iDOTpc.com were kind enough to loan me one of the units to take for a spin.
This is it, right out of the box. One word came to my mind after seeing it next to my PogoLinux machine - tiny. I hoped there was some serious power packed in that little box or someone was going to be unhappy. With that in mind, on to the system specifications.
? VIA C3 E-Series 933MHz Processor
? VIA PLE133 + VT8235 Chipset Motherboard
? 128MB RAM PC133 and up to 1GB of PC100/PC133 SDRAM capacity
? 20GB ATA 100 5400RPM hard drive attached to one of 2 Dual-channel enhanced IDE Ports supporting UDMA 66/100/133
? 16X DVD Drive in the single full height 5.25" drive bay
? 4 USB 1.1 Ports (two in front, two in back), 1 Serial Port, 1 Parallel Port , and 1 PCI Slot
? Integrated Trident 2X AGP with 2D/3D Graphics Acceleration
? Integrated VIA AC97 Audio, 3 Audio Jacks: Line-in, Line-out, and Mic-in
? Onboard VIA 10/100 Base-T Fast Ethernet Controller
? Mini-ITX Tower Case with 150W Power Supply
? Dimension: 10.24"(D) x 5.31"(W) x 11.75"(H)
? LindowsOS 3.0 MP3.com Edition with dedicated tech support
? One Year Parts and Labor Warranty
Some of you who are avid readers may recognize this box. It is none other than the FIC Falcon CR51 small form factor PC that was announced last October. However, it has been updated with the ?etDVD? software from Elegent Technologies. The etDVD software is a boot time embedded software set that does all the magic of audio and video playback at boot time.
Brains! I need Brains!
Of course, I couldn't resist cracking the case. While there were some instructions included, I thought it would be more interesting to see how intuitive it would be to go without. Three thumb screws on the back side released the side panel which slid away. Inside, there isn't a whole lot to see. Yes. On the left you can just get a glimpse of the hard drive which is mounted to the floor of the chassis. Dead center is the DVD drive, and to the upper right is the teeny tiny power supply. Again, not too interesting. But, I discovered that one of the thumb screws actually held onto the DVD drive sled. After popping off the front face plate, I found the mate to the thumb screw. Removing this, I was able to get the DVD drive out of the way and have a better look at the rest of the insides.
As expected, I wasn't a good photographer. But let me assure you, everything was clean and small. You can make out the twin SDRAM sockets there at the top, the CPU and fan assembly just below that. Under the green heatsink resides the chipset, and over there on the right you can see the single PCI slot. Not a whole lot of room in there for anything else.
Fire It up!
Once I had it back together, I connected it to my spare monitor, keyboard, and mouse. (At $3
And going off just what I saw in the slash post, there's no mention of it. Since I can't read the article (slashdotted) I can only go on what is availiable to me.
So since time shifting wasn't mentioned about windows media center or linux, I can only assume since the author is trying to compare lindows to media center that it must have time shifting capabilities.
So how is the time shifting on linux? Could someone from linuxhardware.com please either provide another mirror to the article, or just answer my reply? I'm just really curious to know if it's working well in lindows.
Yours Truly
Toq
Lindows so far has been all hype and no delivery. I wouldn't touch anything backed by Robertson, and I love how Lindows is on its 3rd version in less than a year.
When I was working for a .com that was trying to choose a name, the marketing folks made some very strong points for why you don't have to choose something that people are familiar with. Given that we were promoting widgets, they recommended we not name ourselves widgets.com, ourwidgets.com, or ewidgets.com. Their argument was that if you have a good product you can create your own name. Does Yahoo! need the word "directory" in their name? Does Ebay need the word "Auctions" in its name? Using something wacky wasn't going to hurt you, and it would allow you to later branch out into other markets.
Software developers really need to look at this lesson. Repeat after me, "The name of your program doesn't have to start with 'Win', 'g', 'k', 'Java', or 'X'".
Somebody replied to a similar rant of mine here on slashdot. They said that if you wrote a program that browsed Ebay auctions, you should be allowed to put ebay in the name. Maybe you should be allowed to, but that might prevent you from also supporting Yahoo or some other auction site in the future. Its not a good idea.
In the case of Lindows, the fact that they are using the name of their competitor cheapens them. I have to wonder why they don't think they can't create their own hype. Is their product not good enough?
Call me spoiled. I watch Alias, The Practice, and even Fraser in HDTV every week. HDNet's sports are outstanding. And the recent Olympic games awe-inspiring. Guests to my home are blown away when I fire up PBS's continually-playing demo loop.
Despite the many many nay-sayers, HDTV is here, now.
Yet I keep seeing product announcements (Lindows Media, Mystro, Dish's 721 etc.) boasting competition to the Tivo, yet not a one is capable of handling HTDV. Tivo can't yet either.
I'm having to build my own digital recorder on an PC running (shudder) Windows XP with a MyHD card. The data rate of HDTV is high, but not unmanageable. MyHD records and displays a live program using less than 10% of the processor (1.8GHz P4, I'll grant).
I'm frankly tired of viewing programs with non-square pixels, incomplete color gamuts, and a mere 480 lines of (interlaced) resolution. Wake me when one of these companies does HDTV.
I can sum it up for you in two words: NOT GOOD. It doesn't play DVDs properly, and they need to add new hardware to it to fix that problem. So much for a media PC.
Pubcrawler.ca
.
A few months back when I was looking into building media-centric PC's for the kids. The DVD software, afaik, is proprietary (licenced CSS codes), and embedded within the bootprom.
All in all, it looked like a completely gutless solution, incapable of doing nearly everything I wanted it to do.
It's hardly something to compete with the tivo-like feature set and processing power that the P4/windows based media PC's from big vendors provides.
It's more like a really really expensive, but really really crappy, DVD player. That runs linux.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Now, we only need to find a +2 Shield of Flame Resitence vs. Trolls and we'll save the princess!
(Jet lag is a horrible thing)
idiotpc.com??? Not a good name, but I know a few people that qualify buying a PC from them.
Sounds like some deformed offspring of the marketing departments of Apple and Microsoft.
Are they going to have a server version called iDOTnet?
Here is the Reader's Digest Condensed Version(R)
Tried the box for days. Sucked bad at DVDs because this version uses software decoder. Couldn't read tags on MP3s or list the directories correctly. Lindows couldn't make up their mind if they supported software that was on their own site. Only available at one place. Guys at that place were nice and knowlegable. System was marginal at best. Wouldn't recommend it to a friend. Not a viable contender to Windows Media Center because it simply lacks power. Costs under $400 sans monitor, kb, mouse. Nice try, but don't buy. The End.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I probably shouldn't admit this in a forum of people who obviously despise Lindows, but I have tried it and I did like it. I think I have a pretty good handle on OSs having used NetWare, Windows, UNIX, Linux, VMS, etc and I found Lindows very easy to install, very easy to navigate and -- more importantly -- very easy to get working on my Windows network.
Lindows isn't necessarily here for the hard core Linux user. It's for the masses. For similar reasons that hard core Linux/Unix folks hate Windows, they will hate Lindows.
I commend them for trying. Before version 3, I didn't think it would go anywhere, but after actually using it for a while, my opinion has changed.
Maybe its just the "dows" suffix that makes products blow monkey chunks. Its pronounced just like "Doh!", only its pluralized to indicate a whole mess of 'em.
It may not be likely, but it sure would explain a couple few things...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
If Lindows Media computer is able to create an interface where the user finds absolutely
nothing lacking in comparison to Windows media Computer & is cheaper - why not ?
The only reason linux is losing out on the desktop is because of the inability to execute applications (without struggling with wine).
With all-in-a-box system like a media computer that wouldnt require specific applications to perform tasks there is a good chance that windows will lose out.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
As far as I understand from the review. It doesn't do what its meant to do (DVD etc) very well and it can't display on a TV. No pardon me if I wrong but I would want something like this to show stuff on my TV. So basically I can spend £250 on this or £99 on a DVD player than can do the same thing? I know where I'm putting my money
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
---
And who buys these "media PCs" anyway? Does anyone have any info on the size of this market?
How did it do DVD? Did it have a propeitary software or hardware decoder?
Here's a list of the multi media players it seems they are using.
Not exactly a a good answer to his question. Basicly, the answer is that it only decodes DVD's at boot time. Not while running GNU/Linux.
From the review:
The etDVD software is a boot time embedded software set that does all the magic of audio and video playback at boot time.
Comparing these to a windows media computer isn't even fair. They are 2 different beasts. A windows media computer is built around high end hardware capable of doing PVR duties. This little box is a dvd player w/ a hard drive, (as is mine). It was silly of them to sell this without a hardware decoder.
But with a hardware decoder it should do fine. (I run mine under windows because I haven't been able to get the drivers for the hardware video decoder working under linux. Also, I want a dvd player that works with my remote control and that I can pop the dvd in and have the menu come up, not something I have to work at the keyboard for. I know these features are available, but I haven't seen a simple package that combines these 3 things without me having to hack things up.) I get almost no cpu utilization under windows. When I do get jumps in the video/audio, it's caused by the isa bus (and I have bus mastering, it just sucks), not by the hardware. The box works well for what I wanted when I bought it: A dvd player that is small and trendy looking, but is updatable with standard pc parts and can take a LOT of storage for my music, (I have ALOT of music. I have ripped my hundred's of CD's to the computer to make them all portable at once).
But a media center? That it is not. The system reviewed should be compared to a set-top box that has a dvd player and can access mp3's, ogg's, and such. I'm thinking about building a new box to work as a media center, but I'll use a bigger case, MUCH stronger hardware so I can use PVR capabilities, and probably a package like the PVR ones that have been discussed here before. Either that or a windows media center computer.
I do security
I think we all want someone to beat Microsoft at their own game. My only hope is that more companies start porting their apps towards UNIX based environments. Linux is great at work, but at home I am locked into a microsoft PC because of gaming / multimedia. At least Lindows is making progress on bridgeing the gap. 2 thumbs up for effort to those guys.