FIA On3 Networked Multimedia System Reviewed

Anonymous Howard writes "Designtechnica has reviewed Fia's On3 networked multimedia system. It uses Linux for its OS, supports Samba, audio & video (including Ogg), but the On3 seems to be marred by a lack of some important features. For example, you can't create playlists or autoplaylists (playlists based on rules.) You can only play music sorted in folders, so if your music is sorted by artist and album, you can only listen to each folder at a time. Files are played back in alphanumeric order, so playback order depends on how the tracks are named. The On3 does not handle ID3 tags and track names are simply the name of the file. I'm trying to find a non-microsoft, out-of-the-box solution for a networked media system. Are there any other solutions out there? How do they compare? Are they worth it or does the industry still have a lot of growing to do?"

Comments

Re:Is it a myth

[jarich]

Yup... just install MythMusic along with your MythTV system

I will say that I don't much care for the way it handles large amounts of tracks though... it needs a better UI for setting up playlists.

Links?

[TheRaven64]

Can you not simply create a directory called `Playlists', a set of subdirectories with the names of playlists, and fill each of these with links you the music files? A very short shell script should be able to create these directories from .m3u files. Smart Playlists would be a bit harder to implement, but since it runs Linux it should be relatively easy to create a cron job that scans the ID3 tags and creates / removes links based on certain criteria - ideally with a UI visible from a remote system.

From TFA:

Video: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, RPM4, MOV, and AVI.

This seems a bit odd, since MPEG-4 is an encoding standard, DivX and XviD are implementations of MPEG-4, MOV and AVI are container file formats. Saying it plays MOV and AVI files presumable means that it can play MPEG-1/2/4 streams inside MOV and AVI containers, but this is highly ambiguous.

Check out TomsHardware.com's review of Soundbridge

[PieEye]

It sounds like the Roku Soundbridge might be what you're looking for. Non-MS, but plays lots of formats (no OGG though).

Tom's Networking just did a review that covers this subject, including how to serve tunage to it over a Linux server (they mention the hacked NSLU2 project, but it sounds like any Linux box could do the job).

Or, heck, skip the network and just use CompactFlash.

Re:XBMC

[bm17]

I don't think that the particular Focus Enhancements chip on the Xbox can generate an HD signal.

another alternative : the 1.4 Ghz Xbox

[da5idnetlimit.com]

If you have a wee bit more money, there is the upgraded Xbox...

Celeron 1.4 ghz instead of the 700 Mhz, 128 Mo Ram instead of 64...

Available as a reboxed set @ 399 US $.

For the more adventurous, you can have just the modded xbox mobo for 260 US $...

So you still have a microsoft box (which you don't want), but now with extra juice to run all apps...

No ultra-compressed video stream should pose problem anymore, and you have better perf on all Original Xbox Games (tm)...

+ Having access to just the mobo should give you the opportunity to mod your own media center, if you're into that...

As parent said, no video capture.
But you have everything else now possible 8)