Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Tech of the Roku Netflix Player
MojoKid writes "A little over a week ago Netflix unveiled the Netflix Player, developed by the team at Roku, a set-top box for watching on-demand movies and TV. This interview with Tim Twerdahl, the VP of Consumer Products for Roku, goes into some detail about the guts of the box and the future of the set-top box. Of course the system runs an embedded Linux OS, but interestingly also runs on a Nexperia (Philips) media processor."
It's not exactly what you'd call "inside" the tech of the box, here's all you learn:
*It uses a custom-built linux (of which no details are given)
*It has flash memory inside it
*It has an NXP processor
The summary actually contains more technical details about the box than the article itself, purely because it mentions that the NXP is made by Philips.
I know it's Sunday and all, but come on, try harder.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
That's nice, but the GPL says if YOU distribute binaries then YOU have to offer source to the recipients. Saying "you can get it the same place we did" doesn't satisfy the requirements.
Umm. IETab doesn't "fool" anybody. It just embeds an actual IE rendered page into a FF tab as a matter of convenience. Other than the UI convenience, there is no difference between IETab and IE. IETab is about as useless on Linux or Mac as a Vista DVD with "Fedora" written on it in white-out.
So the obvious question is, where do I get the source code?
Matt Lee of the Free Software Foundation asked essentially the same question on the day Roku's Netflix Player was launched (May 20). One Roku guy answered (on May 20): "Our GPL Source has not been posted yet, but it will be in the next small number of days." Another Roku guy answered: "We will post the source code just as soon as humanly possible. As you can imagine things are pretty busy around here..." (Don't read the whole forum thread. Your brain will shrink.)AFAIK, the source code hasn't been posted yet. When it does get posted, "Netflix Player" will probably get its own tab here.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Intel DG45FC, full HD support, HDMI (unknown if that includes audio), integrated 7.1 audio, Gigabit, SATA, load of USB. Diskless and cache to RAM with standard DDR2 up to 4GB. Fully assembled would likely be under $300 and put the Roku to flying shame. If their media player is anything like their music player be prepared for disappointment. AppleTV is probably better. FWIW, this post not intended as a troll. I'm speaking as someone who has owned both an HD1000 and M1001.
Assuming you're not trolling, it depends.
Amazon is required to post the source code to their GPL'ed components; this would include the Linux kernel and any modifications they made to it.
However, using a GPL'ed kernel with non-GPL'ed userland is totally fine in most cases. (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#PortProgramToGL). Assuming you meant more than just the Kindle's now kinda-rickety-looking 2.6.10 kernel (Source: Wikipedia), which looks like it was uploaded in 2004 when you said "Kindle's code", you're probably SOL. I don't know what Kindle's userland looks like but I'd be surprised if the interesting parts were GPL.