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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).
"MUSEUM QUALITY ART"!??!
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
We all know this is going to used exclusively for porn; you aren't fooling anyone.
Now people have something to shorten the life span of their expensive Plasma displays... I think it would be cheaper to just to buy a few art prints (cheaper and higher resolution too) and rotate them every few months. Of course, the expensive "I've got way too much time on my hands" coolness factor would be diminished somewhat.
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)
My neighbor just bought a $4000 Plasma from Gateway. I tried to find the nicest way to tell him it sucked. I said it was mature technology. Was I being too nice?
Someone hates these cans.
I don't understand why they would create a system to showcase HDTV sets and not include DVI output on the system? Most, if not all newer HDTV sets include DVI inputs in order to facilitate pixel-perfect representation on the screen.
:) ) but with no DVI output I think my other plan of putting my G4 out in the living room seems like a better plan.
I would buy one of these (once I buy my nice little 42" LCD rear-proj from Sony
.. 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.
A modded Xbox can do the same thing (play mpeg2, divx etc.) off dvd-r or streamed off the network with HDTV output up to 1920p. See www.xboxmediacenter.com and www.xbins.org/xbmp.php.
One key component that I did not see addressed in the article is how you control this device. Is there a remote that lets you interact with a TV friendly menu system?
...
This question arises because one of the main headaches associated with my current streaming media system (home built) is that using the wireless mouse and keyboard to navigate is difficult from a reasonable TV/audio viewing and listening distance
If they have addressed this issue at all, I will have to buy one. I would love to get away from requiring a full PC in my entertainment rack since all it does is stream data from my fileservers anyway.
And yes, I have tried other embedded devices, but most have proprietary OS, and linux ones do not generally support my specific set of audio and video requirements.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Where is the slashdot credit card with karma points for every purchase.
I paid cash for the following, but don't think I wouldn't have used the slashdot card so I could troll more often.
First it was the netpliance
Then the apex dvd player that plays mp3s
then the tivo and tivonet
now it's a box to display hdtv stuff without a computer
cool, but I think this has more in common with the netpliance than with the other three which are still used.
For its price I would expect more, like something to read straight from a dvd, harddrive or something, no wait that would be useful.
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
Something doesn't add up. If linux costs $699, then how can they sell the whole thing for $499?!
The advantage of optical cable is it's immune to RF noise, but you'd have to live in an unusually noisy environment for it to be bad enough to corrupt a relatively low-speed signal like that. I used to run ordinary S/PDIF over 20m of cheap-ass audio cable (computer to receiver's DACs), and couldn't pick the difference between a CD played on the computer to one played on the local CD-player.
I have a friend with an overpriced stereo system that actually uses fully balanced AES cables to run the digital signal from his CD transport to the DACs, but even he admits that's pure overkill.
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.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If I recall correctly, HDTV was being proposed for the UK during the mid-to-late 80's, but effective lobbying from a certain Mr. Rupert Murdoch, who had recently introduced his very expensive and (then) loss making satellite tv system "SKY" (which wouldn't be able to carry HDTV signals) killed the matter stone dead.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
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?
It's all to do with relative gains.
NTSC to HDTV is quite an improvement. PAL and PAL+ to HDTV is less of an improvement. 768x572 vs 800x600 is a negligable gain and 768x572 vs 1280 x 1028 is a gain but not enough to warrant the additional expenditure by the service providers/cable companies and the like. The additional bandwidth required would reduce the number of available channels and no broadcaster will go for that scenario. Then there's obtaining the content which is thin on the ground.
I would rather have good quality digital PAL widescreen broadcasts in number than a few HDTV ones. PAL widescreen projects fine to about 4m x 2m using my cheap projector system.
HDTV is partly marketing and it is being as a carrot, a way of getting people to upgrade to digital in the US. In the UK where there's a lot of digital usage already it's not needed.
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
Hmm...that's funny, I could have sworn that MythTV has had this for a while. It's pretty easy, pick up a pcHDTV card for $200 and make sure you've got some significant hard disk space and you should be ready to go.
Reminds me of Microsoft bragging about their future "Implicit Query" technology when dashboard already has it.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
if the machine doesn't have enough memory to guarantee that you can use the block returned from malloc(), why does it pretend to?
It's kind of like airlines overbooking seats.
In Linux 2.7, an improved malloc() will return memory 4 hours later and also give you a free voucher good for memory allocation anywhere that your computer can fly.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
So, it looks to me like this thing isn't a PVR. It doesn't record -- it's just a player. It will play High-Def quality MPEGs, but, ummmm...., if this ain't a recorder, how do I get the HD MPEGs in the first place? Neither ReplayTV nor TiVo record at HD. Does this make sense only if you already have a HDTV tuner for your PC? If you've got that, though, and a way of getting HD signal out of the PC, why do you need this?
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.
I've had a Roku box since the beginning of November. It's hooked to a 42" Panasonic Plasma (852x480) running at 1080i. The other end of the Roku is hooked to a wireless 802.11g game adapter. Any shared files/directories are automatically mounted and can be browsed with the UI.
The Roku can be programmed via shell scripts or you can use the included remote for selecting music and/or pictures.
The UI is still a little rough, but they are working on it (two beta releases since initial release), and it keeps getting better.
I'm looking forward to the release of the SDK and hacking a screensaver, as the screensaver selection is pretty limited- bouncing Roku logo, string art, or bouncing clock.
I still haven't been able to play any mpeg files, but the still picture slideshow looks great. Roku Support says more picture/movie formats are coming 'soon'.
All in all, it's a good off-the-shelf solution for playing music that is easy for the family to use. I expect it will get better with each release...
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
We didn't choose to add DVI because of the additional cost and complexity. We felt that customers would overall be well served with component and and vga. Of course, DVI is being considered for future products.
-Patrick
-Sr. Software Engineer, Roku.
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...
Checking that enough memory is definitely available for a fork() wouldn't make the speed drop significantly; all the kernel must do is make sure the memory is available and mark it as used, not actually allocate it and map it into the process's address space. You can still have copy-on-write as long as the space is there in case you need it later.
You would need more swap space, with most of it sitting unused most of the time 'just in case', but I don't think this is too bad: 60 gigs seems like a too-big estimate. Something like ten times physical RAM would be enough, surely, and that is easily affordable on modern hardware. Again, having extra swap space available doesn't mean more swapping will happen - only that if the memory is used later, the reserved swap space is there ready for use, rather than getting out of memory and killing processes.
OK - for desktop systems and most servers I think it's reasonable to have overallocation. Certainly for fork() and probably for malloc(), although I would like a malloc_yes_really() call for writing daemons which need to stay running no matter what and which do their own out-of-memory recovery.
But the article was talking about embedded systems. These often don't have swap space, but do have software which is aware of the memory limitations and tries to do the right thing. It can't do that if the kernel plays games with memory allocation and pretends to have space that isn't there. So guaranteed memory allocation needs to be available as an option, even if it's not the default.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Yes, but the more electrical connections you have, the more potential to introduce ground loops and hum into the entire system. I usually prefer optical over coax because it keeps things electrically isolated. Especially if I have the equipment spread out over multiple circuits.