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Viiv 1.5 May End Traditional Media PCs
An anonymous reader writes "CNET.com.au makes an interesting case for why the next revision of Viiv will kill off living room PCs as we know them. Instead, we'll be streaming content to digital media adapters from a PC in our home office. From the article: 'The existence of digital media adapters will totally remove the need to have a media centre PC taking up space in your living room, unless you're one of the few users that finds it practical to do anything other than passively soak up multimedia content whilst relaxing on the couch.'"
FTFA : "Such multi-tasking makes dual-core processors a necessity"
Hahaha ! What about requiring a good scheduler ? Multitasking has nothing to do with multi cores...
Marketing push or simply cluelessness ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
The whole home theater industry has been moving in that direction for quite some time. You have a home media storage "furnace" that serves up video and then a small client box for your TV.
You see that already with the XBox hacks, XBox 360 and Windows Media Center, and networked DVD players
Now VIIV may help that along but the technology has already been in existence (and in use) for years.
Well... except for maybe the DRM controls that VIIV will provide...
I have a soft modded xbox that has samba access to the Ubuntu pc in my bedroom, plus NAT access to the net. Trivial, and all it cost was a 2nd hand xbox.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Doesn't Apple's Airport Express do this already for audio, with video capability soon to be released?
It may take off, but I doubt it will be revolutionary. I think there's an Airport capable of this, and it really hasn't been that huge either. The article doesn't understand the media PC _at all_. They assume you're putting a full fledged ugly grey cased PC next to your TV. I don't know a single person who's actually ever done that. More likely you've got a Mini itx box with a big laptop hard drive and maybe a TV-in card (if you want a DVR). Have you seen the Mini itx cases out there? They look better than most of the components I have next to my stereo.
For about 350-400 bucks you can have a box that:
Can watch and burn dual layer DVD's
Can listen to and burn CD's and internet radio (and basically any other audio content)
Load full of emulators and Gametap and play games on
Browse the web
And a low power always on media file server that people coming over to your house can grab media from
Like I said, I'm sure there's a market for people who just want to play MP3's over their stereo. But there are already much better solutions that can do more that aren't tied so closely with DRM.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Good point. I think I used my DVD player once to play a CD (my stereo was apart).
Maybe at some point convergence works, but right now you get things that are so-so at a lot of things and excellent at none. Cell phones are a good example.
I don't want or need a shitty camera built in. What's the point? The quality sucks, bad resolution, bad picture quality, maybe an LED for a shitty flash. I rather carry my small digital camera instead. Having one company as your gate keeper is perilous too. Take the cell phone example. I got a LG PM-325 from Sprint. I used the camera twice before realizing unless I paid X dollars a month for "Picture Mail", there was absolutely no way to retrieve them from the phone.
The future downside is that if they every do make the ultimate device that does everything, you're fscked if it get's stolen. There goes your media, your pictures and probably tons of other stuff that you wouldn't want other people to have access to. Carrying your life in your pocket might be convienent, but also dangerous.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
VIIV is hardware based DRM that is closely tied to Intel's Trusted Computing initiative (although they desperately don't want to have the two linked in the media). They claim they will have Linux support, but no-one actually believes that since VIIV is intended to be used within a rigidly controlled operating system which is an almost completely locked down and DRMed media system (cough... Windows Vista...cough). If it does end up with Linux support, you can sure as shit bet that the access to DRMed content will not be allowed unless all the software in the chain (including, I guess the Kernel) has the correct digital signatures (ie... hasn't been recompiled) and has been signed off as "not doing anything we don't want it to."
As I said... fits in with Microsoft and their mandatory driver signing and other control freakery coming in Vista. Doesn't fit in with Linux.
Bingo.
A few years ago I remember someone telling me about a Sears Roebuck catalog he'd seen from the early 1900's. One of the more expensive items was an electric motor which came with a variety of specialized tools and adapters. The idea was you would take a drill, saw, whatever, plug it into this motor to draw power (mechanical power, I mean; probably incredibly dangerous, to judge by similar setups on modern farm equipment, but presumably it worked), do the job, unhook the tool, and then fit the next weird adapter to the next tool.
And in those days, when electric motors were fairly expensive all by themselves and had a low power-to-weight ratio, it probably made sense. These days, of course, every power tool has its own motor, and that's how people prefer it.
Considering that most TV's and DVD players and stereos and, hell, microwave ovens now have more computational power than the average user had on his desktop a couple of decades ago, I see no reason to assume that the trend toward divergence isn't continuing into the present day.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Hmm, sounds like MythTV. However in MythTV, you simply rip your DVDs and CDs to storage rather than having them in a carousel. My backend only has 4 tuners and 1TB of storage, but 6 tuners and "massive storage" is certainly feasible.
Microsoft is starting to do this with the XBOX 360 and its connectivity with MCE, but the problem there is that the 360 doesn't really extend the functions; as I understand it, it only has limited playback abilities. Imagine if the 360 could connect to MCE, select a channel, and display it...or schedule a show to be recorded by the server while you continue gaming.
Yep, sounds exactly like MythTV. My frontend boxes are XBoxen, I can do what I like on the frontend while the backend is working. My big problem with using a MCE machine is all the DRM involved. If I want to watch what I have recorded/ripped/bought wherever/whenever I like my computer shouldn't stop be from doing it by "managing my rights". My rights don't need management, they were doing just fine on their own.
We're just scratching the surface of how networking is going to affect the way we distribute and view television and movies.
The surface has been scratched and the subsurface looks good. My one worry is that as DRMed devices become more prevalent the average buyer will start to think "that's just the way it is" when they run into DRM limitations/restrictions. Give me MPEG or give me death.
Enigma
Yeah right, they just want us to stream directly from the Studios. Why have all that pesky content laying around when we can just license everything and let the Studios keep it in-house?
But if you want niche programming or the truly inspired stuff that never took off (Fox's "Action" anyone?) or underground video, then you can't depend on a commercial service to provide it.
South Park and Tripping the Rift would never have become mainstream if it weren't for viral memetics, and that doesn't happen on services managed by payola-whores like Time-Warner, Adelphia or Charter.
I'd rather roll my own system and be free to access whatever content I like via Charter, Netflix, iFilm, YouTube, or even bittorrent.
I can see the fnords!