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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).
.. 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.
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
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?