What A Portable Media Center Might Look Like
An anonymous reader writes "From the Redmond's answer to iPOD dept... While wandering the exhibitor aisles at Embedded DevCon, we were drawn to this slick looking reference design board in the Freescale (formerly Motorola Semiconductor) booth. The Portable Media Player Reference Design, a.k.a. "Jazz", is based on a Freescale i.MX21 embedded processor, runs Windows CE, and is compliant with Microsoft's Portable Media Center (PMC) standard. PMCs, Microsoft's answer to the iPOD, will initially support digital music and videos, digitally recorded television shows, and digital photos."
iRiver's PMP-140 runs Ogg, Divx, and MPEG-4, and... it's based on Linux :). Coming soon, already on my wishlist ..
. ht ml
http://www.iriverswitzerland.com/product/pmp140
This functionality exists in these two devices. They are small, portable (0.5 kg) with a decent battery life (2.5~3hrs watching divx) have MStick and CF interfaces, USB 2.0 and touch screen, 256 (u50) or 512 (u70).
True they are expensive at USD 1,500 and USD 1,700
But they are a full-blown computer with a Celery M 900 o Centrino 1Ghz.
I'd rather buy one of these.
To answer your question, read this In a nutshell, pre-emptive multitasking is where the OS decides how much processor time programs have to complete their work, in contrast to co-operative multitasking where a program has to relinquish the use of the processor.
Get the Neuros. It supports ogg, has open source software, and is fairly inexpensive.
I also reply below your current threshold.