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A Hackable Media Player For HDTV

Posted by timothy on from the lacks-tuner-and-hard-drive dept.

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).

7 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Storage capacity? by ChangeOnInstall · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)
  2. Now all we need.. by Channard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    .. 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.

  3. DVB by shaka · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
  4. Very ironic by arvindn · · Score: 3, Interesting
    that linux is majorly used on all these media devices, in the movie industry, and in cell phones, and sound still doesn't work properly on linux desktops!

    (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.)

  5. XBox by unixbob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  6. "Media" Player? by Dunark · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  7. Re:Who cares? It's still digital by Freedom+Bug · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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