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A Hackable Media Player For HDTV
An anonymous reader writes "Embedded Linux and an open, hacker-friendly architecture power the world's first high definition media player, the $499 Roku HD1000. The brainchild of ReplayTV inventor Anthony Wood, the device could touch off a cottage industry of third-party applications and media packs that work with its Linux-based OS and user-friendly media APIs. Out of the box, the HD1000 can stream MPEG and MPEG2, play music, loop JPEGs, and more to an HDTV -- all at the same time. Roku is selling "Art Packs" of everything from museum-quality art to hot-rod cars as memory cards that work with the device. And, the company will release a C/C++ SDK for the HD1000 before 2004. Finally, there's something to actually show on your $5,000 54-inch plasma TV or 37-inch LCD TV." (Roku is also one of the companies mentioned in an earlier posting about using hi-def displays as digital art galleries).
I'm just curious to know what magnitude of storage capacity is required to effectively record HDTV data? Tivo requires about 1GB/hour for basic quality and 3GB/hour for best quality. I don't recall if Tivo what encoding Tivo uses to store data though. Will such a device simply store the broadcast digital stream, or will it reencode it?
(Please excuse me for being a bit of a newb on HDTV here)
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
.. is for some bright spark to add a recorder function/add-on-box to this that will negate the bit that sets HD programs as non recordable.
Being that I live in Europe, I'd rather spend my hard earned money on building my own box for Digital TV (DVB) using this great, open-source, system:
http://www.cadsoft.de/people/kls/vdr/
The DVB standard also includes metadata, so the EPG (electronic program guide) is broadcast together with the actual TV-stream, and it allows for easy recording, editing and storing, as well as playback of mp3, mpeg (or anything else mplayer can handle) and loads of more interesting stuff.
:wq!
DAMN the DMCA. Sorry, I had to get that off my chest.
Lobby for Fair Use. It's our only hope.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
(No, I'm not trolling. I use linux exclusively but its foolish to pretend that it is perfect. And yes, I know about the recent projects like gstreamer, jack and efforts by freedesktop.org to improve the situation. But all that is a long way off from widespread adoption.)
Sounds like a modded XBox. XBox media player uses a port of Mplayer to allow the system to play Mpeg's (1 & 2), AVI, DIVX, MP3 as well as browse JPEG's etc. Only thing it can't do is record. It's got quite an active homebrew dev community
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
*shrug* So what? The big thing in most of Europe is 16:9 WideScreen displays, but you won't find many of them for sale in the U.S. Personally I'd rather have a 16:9 display with digital transmission. It's horses for courses.
Anyway I'm pretty sure that if you fork out for any plasma display on sale in the U.K it can do HDTV via. the DVI connector. There arn't any HDTV broadcasts to use it with, but then there arn't many in the U.S either. You could get an HDTV capable 16:9 display and one of these boxes on import and take advantage of HDTV if you really want it that badly.
Name with held to protect the guilty!
The HD1000 is based on an ATI Xilleon x225 processor which includes a 300MHz MIPS architecture CPU core, 2D and 3D graphics engines, video and graphics scalers, and a high-definition MPEG2 decoder. It comes with 32MB of 133MHz DDR system RAM and 32MB of 133MHz DDR video RAM.
Having coded for an ATI Xilleon x225, in fact I have a box with this almost architecture sat on my desk at home, all I can say is Good Luck.
Oh yes, it's not the worlds first HDTV box. I know of at least one product that predates this with the same chipset which can support HDTV if required.
This thing doesn't have a CD or DVD drive. The last time I checked, Blockbuster wasn't renting movies on memory cards.
Where exactly is the user supposed to get "media" they can play on this device?
Because optical (TOSlink) is at the bottom of the digital-out food chain. The bandwith of optical is a little less than 2/3 of Coax. Sorry to burst the bubble that BestBuy told you. Above Coax is AES/EBU and above that is ST-Glass. THAT is the only optical that has some bandwidth...So I was happy that there was no optical on that. I've got coax cables that cos several hundred dollars that I can use in my home theatre. ::: already warming up a spot for one :::
My
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
If you're thinking about LCD anyway, you may also want to consider a projector -- and they don't cost as much as you might think. For instance, Sanyo's just-released PLV-Z2 (review) lists for around $3k but the street price is closer to $2,000. It has DVI input and 1280x720 resolution which gives full 720p at 16:9. Why settle for a 42" image when you can have a 100" image? ;)
ObForums: For more information on projectors, you may also want to check out AVSForum.com and HomeTheaterForum.com (not explicitly linked to avoid Slashdotting them).
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Unfortunately, there's still jitter: most DAC's are unclocked or clocked by the input signal. And jitter can introduce nasty artifacts.
But if your components are reclocking, it's all good. Bring on the cheap cables. And since you need to reclock it to do many things that people want to do these days, more and more components are doing that reclocking, even if it's not listed anywhere.
Bryan
Ack! If the article you reference is correct, plasma TV's have a horribly short lifespan. Well under 3 years of run-time before they lose HALF of their brightness? If a standard computer monitor did that, people would scream and yell about the poor quality and tell everyone to stay away!
I was taking a really close look at large screen (42" and up) TVs this holiday season, considering an upgrade to my boring old 27" set in our living room. But the more I read, the less I'm impressed with anything out right now. Everyone's telling me the projection sets will likely be discontinued by this time next year, so buying one of them is investing in a dying technology. The plasmas finally seemed to be dropping to reasonable prices, but the technology apparently has some life-span issues. LCD TV's haven't reached their "prime" yet - with nothing but "promises" of larger sizes that compete with the average projection set. To top it all off, HDTV seems like it's about to become standard-issue, but the industry is trying to milk it for as much additional profit as they can squeeze out of it in the meantime. ($500 or so just for a satellite receiver that can get HD - so you can then view only a few special HD channels?)
Nah.... now, my old 27" is starting to look better again.
The real problem is that the UNIX/Linux world has never been able to get interprocess communication right. The problem is that what the application wants is a subroutine call, but what the OS usually gives you is an I/O operation.
An example of good message passing is MsgSend/MsgReceive in QNX. Once you've set up a connection, you call MsgSend, which passes your message to the server waiting in a MsgReceive, and blocks the caller until the server does a MsgReply. This is all optimized so that if the server isn't busy when the call is made, control transfers to the server immediately, the server processes the request, and control transfers back. The most common case is very low overhead. Yet the same operations work over a network if needed.
The wrong way to do it is to marshall up all the data and pump it through a socket, just to talk to another process on the same machine. This generates far more transactions at the OS level, and the overhead is much higher. Because the OS doesn't know you're doing a subroutine-call like operation, there are several extra unnecessary context switches. Worse, systems like CORBA do conversions to network-neutral formats, with even more overhead.
There was an attempt to fix this in Mach, but it was not very successful, and Mach messaging never became mainstream. Windows has COM/DCOM/etc, which is clunky, but good enough to make Office work.
If the article you reference is correct, plasma TV's have a horribly short lifespan. Well under 3 years of run-time before they lose HALF of their brightness?
... I just bought a 73" Mitsubishi rear-projection TV. I ended up buying the 2003 model, because it was $1200 cheaper than the 2004 model, and I don't really need the HDTV tuner right now anyway. It comes with the hookups, so I'll add one when they are affordable, and there's something in the HDTV format worth watching. :-)
... though I shudder to wonder what the sticker price would have been. It's probably at least double what I paid ($3299).
Perhaps this is by design? Planned obsolecense (sp?) is nothing new. Even if they didn't "design" it in, it will help fuel their market if people have to buy new TVs every few years.
Everyone's telling me the projection sets will likely be discontinued by this time next year, so buying one of them is investing in a dying technology.
I hope not
I also just checked their website, and the 2004 line now includes an 82" rear-projection model. If I had known about it before I made my purchase, I might have considered it
Anyway, it sounds like Mitsubishi, at least, is still pushing forward on this technology. My TV is gorgeous, and I really couldn't be happier with the purchase. I did consider an LCD projector (room's not really dark enough) as well as the plasma displays. I found that the plasmas were twice as expensive, for half the screen size. I am not hurting for space, so being able to hang it on the wall wasn't really an issue. I sure hope the lifespan of my rear-projection unit is longer than three years, though...
You forgot to mention two things: 1. Optical cables are expensive, easily destroyed, and can't be grafted to fix a break like coaxial cables. Roll a chair over one, or step on it in the wrong way, and you're in for a whole new length of cable. 2. Optical cables won't propagate ground loop current like coaxial cables will. Optical cables can be useful in solving connections that go from room to room (or house to house) and pick up a ground loop hum somewhere along the way.
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I'd be more concerned about the picture quality loss from using analog component cables - a DVI connector would solve that, as someone else has pointed out.
... the cables came from Blue Jeans Cables.)
I'm currently sending 1080i as analog component video over 60 feet. Such a long length does muck up higher frequency signals, but it has no perceivable effect on HDTV.
(I will admit these are some pretty darn expensive coax