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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)
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!
(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"?
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?
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."
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.