Slashdot Mirror
Squeezebox MP3 Player Hacked to Play Video
Xenna writes "The Squeezebox MP3 Player has found a new application: With the Videobox software
and some cabling it becomes a networked Video Player. This is the latest development to come out of
the active community Slim Devices have managed to attract around
their very hackable MP3 players. Only last week the SoftSqueeze
software player was announced on the Slim users mailing list. The Squeezebox was reviewed on Slashdot last December."
It's gratifying to see a company which is aware of the "geek" segment of the market and is willing to produce intentionally hackable and extensible media players for us to play with. This can only be a good development and I hope they do well.
THIS IS NOT A PORTABLE MP3 PLAYER
this is a networked (wired or wifi) device to plug into your home hifi to stream music from your pc
product overview
The MP3 player software itself is Windows Media Player. Ickles!
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
This software turns the slimbox into a remote - which is not really that cool. You still need a decent video player. Paying $250+ for a remote control for your video player is, well, a bit much.
RTFA's.
It supports ogg according to the review from december.
Audio formats:
* PCM (AIFF, WAV)
o Supports raw pass-through of uncompressed audio
o Sample rates: 32, 44.1 (CD), and 48Khz (DAT)
o Configurable sample rate, byte order, channels
* MP3, MP2:
o Built-in decoding for all MP3/MP2 formats
o Supports all MP3 data rates, including VBR
o Supports all MP3 sample rates
* AAC, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis:
o Supported through server-side decoding
o May be streamed in PCM (raw) or MP3 (transcoded) format
Uh... I may be completely stupid but they are not playing video over the Squeeze. They're just using it as the IR receiver to control "Media Player" on a PC with "TV Out" Woo
Mama's got a Squeezebox
And when Daddy comes home
He never gets no rest
'Cause she's playing all night
And the CODEC's all right
Mama's got a Squeezebox
Daddy never sleeps at night
"Well the stuntman can't eat"
says Valenti, who can't sleep
When you play illegal DIVx
Cuz it's so damn l33t
'Cause she's playing all night
And the movie's all right
Mama's got a Squeezebox
Daddy never sleeps at night
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Basically it is:
A networked MP3 player
Uses your computer to store MP3s - should have enough space for movies
$249
Looks about the size of an access point
Plays ogg and flac
...or if squeezebox was supposed to be slang for vagina. ....which she "wears on her chest"? Anatomy lessons all around, folks. Time to help out those folks whose only knowledge of female anatomy comes from all-night Tomb Raider sessions.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It looks like all VideoBox does is turn your $300 Squeezebox into an LCD display showing the video filename. Woohoo, great, who cares?
This isn't news until someone figures out how to make the Squeezebox stream the video.
--
With all the flames for the iPod and its battery, I can't help but wonder.. do these people think that most consumer products with rechargeable batteries allow the batteries to be replaced easily, if at all? I just threw out a cordless screwdriver whose batteries stopped taking a charge, and there was no replacing them. A few months ago I threw away a rechargeable flashlight for the same reason. So what is it about the iPod that makes it deserve such relentless attacks? Do a google search on "ipod battery" and I'm sure you'll find dozens of sites that offer replacement batteries for the iPod, with detailed instructions on how to do the replacement - that's more than I can say for any of the rechargeable items I've thrown away in the past few years.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
..oddly reminiscent of the Rockbox project (which has also enabled an MP3 player to play video).
Seems like people don't get it. Squeezebox sits in the room with your stereo and lets you remote control a stream of music from your computer (possibly in another room) to your stereo. The idea is that your HD can hold a lot of stuff but you might not want to walk into the other room to change programs.
This hack lets you do the same with video stored on your computer. You sit in your home theatre room (or whatever) Squeezebox is already installed to do remote control on streamed audio, now you can do remote control on streamed video too.
Usefull? Beats me, but at least understand what the product does.
At $300, one could easily build a stripped-down PC system with the same functionality (and more flexibility).
It also doesn't really look too cool either; more like like some standard CE set-top box so there's isn't really an "aesthetic incentive" to buy one of these either.
Sorry, no. It does not become a video player.
It seems it becomes a remote control with a nice LED display.
You still have to "add a way to get your PC's Video & Audio signals to your living room
TV set." ( that's from the link )
It's a cool use of the box, but since the box itself is not actually playing the video or outputting the video (or even the audio) signal, they shouldn't call it a video player.
This Like That - fun with words!
http://www.ipodbattery.com/
I just threw out a cordless screwdriver
A cordless screwdriver? I didn't know screwdrivers had cords in the first place.
Cordless screwdrives don't cost 300 USD. People expect more from a high dollar product sold by a company with a reputation of producing quality products.
There's a list on the SlimDevices website, and there's also an alternative (GPL'd) audio server
I know this is slashdot, but please...
I wasn't too impressed with the pictures online, but in reality it looks very cool.
It's very well made, with a soft-touch rubberized finish - and it's tiny. It easily sits on top of the wave radio that we usually use it with.
I ordered a Squeezebox after reading the /. story posted back in December, and I'm glad I did. I've since added a second box in my house and my Dad bought one too. It's a terrific interface that makes my music collection available anywhere in the house. Slimdevices along with the development community has been great at fixing bugs and enhancing the functionality of the server software and unit firmware. Check 'em out!
Since this just makes the $250 Squeezebox a really expensive remote for you 'puter, you might want to consider some other products instead.
If want you want is just a remote for your computer, then the Keyspan Digital Media Remote provides a $40 dollar alternative.
If you want to stream video to you TV from your Mac, then El Gato's eyeHome will pull this off at the same price as the Squeezebox. It will also stream music from iTunes and do slideshows from iPhoto, with no hacking required. ( I know.. what's the fun in that :) )
If you want to wait for Microsoft Announceware, you could get the Windows Media Center Extender for XBOX and use the XBOX to stream video to your TV.
Or at ~$150 you could get the Linksys Wireless Media Adapter . This is the first round of Intel's Digital Media Adapters , of which there is a good review of the technology at linuxdevices.com
Enjoy -jim
Time to help out those folks whose only knowledge of female anatomy comes from all-night Tomb Raider sessions.
I think this illustration should help to clear up any confusion as to where the squeezebox is located.
The title of this should be changed to read
blah...Hacked to CONTROL the play of video
This "hack" is just a way to used the remote control and display of the Squeezebox to control a PC's video playback. This is not really news worthy IMHO since the advantage of the Squeezebox is that you are not near your PC and can play your MP3's still. If you've got a PC connected to your TV, use the TV display to control the video for goodness sake. It'll be right there in front of you and far easier to see and use since there are many remote PC controllers already out.
BTW, a Sharp Zaurus can play SAMBA mounted directories over WiFi. Shoutcast could feed the audio stream and external speakers to amplify the sound...
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
If you're wishing that there were a device that did what the headline suggests that this hack does (that is, play AVIs and stuff without a PC doing all the work) then you might want to look into this.
0 03/qcast/qcast -3.html
I bought an early release of the BroadQ QCast software (which I believe is now sold as the Mad Catz GameShark Media Player) for the PS2. It's pretty interesting - you have to get the PS2 network adapter so that your PS2 has ethernet, and then you also have to run the Java based streaming server app on the server that has all your media files on it. Once you've done that, you run this software and it lets you browse and play your audio and video media.
Initially I was pretty disappointed in the video performance. Basically most of the movies I had wouldn't play (either due to codec incompatibility, or the codec not being able to keep up with the frame rate) and especially because there was no fast-forward or rewind. A later release fixed most of those issues including the FF/RW.
It's still kinda cool but I'm sort of over my movie-ripping phase and back to DVDs so I don't use it that much. To be honest it's fairly cumbersome to get it all set up, so unless you really want to watch a lot of non-DVD digital video on your TV, it's probably not worth it. But you might find that this is a good audio solution with the bonus of movie playback.
Tom's Hardware has a review that's concurrent with my initial experiences:
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/