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Linksys DVD player w/ WiFi and ethernet
An anonymous reader writes "Linksys has announced a progressive scan DVD player with 802.11g and ethernet. Users can stream MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX, MP3, WMA, and other formats from their PC to the TV. Sure I can do this cobbling together other tools, but this is a self contained box even newbies can use. Think how many people could install and config a router and an AP, versus the number of people that can plug in one of the self-contained wireless routers? "
when it runs ogg.
There's a growing segment of the Joe Electronics Consumer population that's currently leapfrogging right over it. Most plasma TVs these days have an RGB input (standard VGA plug).
My 42" Samsung knockoff can do 1024x768, no problems. Even text looks great from the couch. The PC is tucked incospicuously out of the way. Although I have a regular progressive scan Sony DVD Player hooked directly to the TV, the PC of course has a DVD player, in addition to an 802.11g connection, an ATI AIW TV tuner card, and a giant hard drive.
Granted, the price point is a little higher, but the feature set is a LOT higher.
As far as I can tell, this would save me exactly one S-Video cable, from my livingroom PC to the TV - And I'd just need to replace that with an ethernet cable.
Assuming they sell this at a price comparable to a typical standalone DVD player, it does nothing more than choose one box over another, with the added "bonus" of using quite a bit of your LAN's bandwidth while reducing overall flexibility of content (Can it play flash? My PC can, and dumps it out to the TV. Can it play "Fred's obscure and proprietary video encoding format"? If it exists, my PC can, and dumps it out to the TV.).
I suppose one could argue that this means you wouldn't need a livingroom PC at all - But I strongly suspect that such an argument automatically excludes 99% of the potential market for such a product.
Have I missed any cool features of this which might make it more useful? As I understand it, it does nothing I can't already do.
Thats a load of crap. God I wish these hardware companies would stop supporting WMA.
These kind of devices should have a standard architecture that supports plugins for new, emerging, and custom media formats (Oh wait! That would defeat the built-in obsolescence). Even if the plugin architecture were platform-specific and not platform-agnostic (somehow, Ogg-Theora (or whatever the Ogg video format is) decoding in Java is likely to be, less than spectacular, perfornace-wise). it would be a start. The next step is a standard API for plugins, and, perhaps, manufacturer-supported remote compilation for each platform.
Otherwise, we won't get the kind of upgradability we'd like without the platform being completely open.
You could've hired me.
but how many people would want to open up their xbox and mess around with even just the pogo pin stuff, let alone solder their own mod chip. and then to flash the chip!?! install the dashboard!?! :)
ok - you and I have obviously done this, but i don't know anyone in the general consumer market who would even think of doing this.
if they want to pay me to do it for them though... that's another issue
They say it plays DVDs and VCDs. They say it will play Divx from your PC. But will it play a Divx CD (and if not, why the hell not?)? Will it play SVCD (from the media)? The press release is damn poor, leaving such obvious points unaddressed, does not reflect well on the product.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
We have all seen the reports of the various PC manufacturers trying to get a bigger piece of the home entertainment pie. Dell and Gateway being the most obvious.. Also Microsoft, with their weak XP Media Center, and more interesting X-Box tie-ins.
Now, we've got the dominant producer of Internet infrastructure jumping in with a networked DVD player. Interesting... I wonder if this was one of the major reasons for buying Linksys, and we me see more from them.
This sounds like it was created to stream movies designed for a comptuer screen onto a TV set. Can you imagine trying to play a 640x480 movie on a 60 inch plasma TV? Talk about looking like shit.
NTSC DV is usually 720 x 480: just because Plasmas are big, doesn't mean they're high resolution.
You do know VGA monitors are better than TVs, right?
Hmm... storing a lot of home-theatre-quality, progressive-scan video with 6.1 sound on a hard drive doesn't fit today's drive capacities or wireless speeds. Won't be feasible without drives hit the terabyte range and gigabit wireless.
:)
Nah. If DVDs take up [at most!] 8-9GB, and I have 120GB+ of storage (not uncommon amongst me & my friends) then I think you'll find we can store quite a bit. DVD bitrates max out at 10Mbps, which 802.11b can theoretically handle (11Mpbs) and 802.11g should be able to handle just fine.
SDTV has miserably low bitrates (~1.2Mbps IIRC?).
I recently had some DVDs that wouldn't play on any of my DVD players (faulty discs, they've since been returned) - luckily my PC's DVD-ROM drive is a bit better with them. I did a rip-to-divx, fling-over-wireless-to-laptop, display-on-TV, and the quality wasn't all that bad. I really should have upped the bitrate, but hey I was slack
Of course, it all changes if you want to do multiple streams... and 25 DVDs-worth may not be considered "a lot" of data.
"No HDCD playing, and no SACD playing. Blarg! "
No Midi or RealMedia support either, BLARG!
"Derp de derp."