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Ubuntu TV: Coming Soon To a Living Room Near You (Video)
Apple TV is a little device you hook to your television. Ubuntu TV (motto: "TV for human beings") is going to be inside your TV, says Peter Goodall, Canonical's Product Manage for Ubuntu TV. At CES, he described Ubuntu TV to Timothy Lord in detail. Join them via Slashdot Video to see what's up with this Ubuntu venture, which has lots of competition; "Smart TV" was a major CES catchphrase this year.
The conventional wisdom which I'm sure we'll soon be subjected to, is the problem this device has is content, where will they get the TV equivalent of top40 content, etc.
The real problem this device has, is why would someone buy it instead of apple/roku/homebrew mythtv/boxee/tivo/xmbc/android tv... any others I've missed? What makes this one special other than its a different manufacturer trying to do the same thing. If anything I'm curious how well this device conforms from a user perspective to the boring standard model all the other developers are using. Even the idea that something new or unique could exist in this market is unthinkable.
The /. car analogy is good luck trying to tell commuter vehicles apart when trying to purchase a new car. The marketing materials are useless because they either insist that you'll get laid if you select their car, or they're puffed up with useless comparison charts (stereotypically you'll have a column of something like "number of tires" all being 4 in each row, or ships with a steering wheel all having a "Y". Why have that column?). The salespeople just want to sell you the most expensive car with the most expensive dealer addons and the most expensive possible financing package. Your friends will provide mostly useless anecdotes about their individual car's maintenance history and peculiar favorite parts, which mostly tells you more about them than about the car model in general. Any decision making data about use, comfort, reliability, economics are simply unobtainable.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The VCR/TV combos that I saw were always portable TVs. I quite often saw them in office environments, where they could be moved to where ever training or a presentation required them. In such a case, a separate TV and VCR wasn't a good option, because of having to carry 2 items, and the hassle of rewiring them together each time they were moved. And they probably had a useful life of, what 10-15 years?
For large screen TVs, building a VCR in wasn't very common. I imagine there was such a product but I never saw one.
How about MythTV Bittorrent Tracker MythTV-GUI
Everyone with a MythTV box connected together sharing TV/SAT/DVD/Whatever. If it's a file sharing network then the upload speed of each DSL would not be an issue. Maybe even a "Push - Pull" function. No website to tie it all together. Just built in search for other MythTV systems online. After a year or two every show out there would be recorded and shared. Only new shows/movies would need to be "acuired."
A hive mind of DVRs! Youtube be damed. MPAA go to h....
A Video network "By the People, For the People!"
Slashdot Hackers! Go Forth and "Share the Code!"
PS. I like the Debian TV idea too.
XBMC already runs nicely on the pi; the software-rendered GUI maxes out the CPU (I'm not sure if this is before or after the software renderer improvements they're working on), but hardware accelerated 1080p30 playback is fine - one of the XBMC developers was given access to an alpha board IIRC. Apparently the integration is one of the many things the Pi people have been asked not to talk about, so I presume things are brewing behind the scenes and they don't want to be assaulted with questions until it's 100% finished.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Samsung is working on a "user upgradeable" TV with plug in modules. There was little detail about it at CES this year, but it appeared from the demos that you could plug in modules to upgrade CPU, operating system, and image processing components.
I don't know exactly how much of the TV is upgradeable, but Samsung suggested that most of the important bits of the TV could be upgraded this way.
-ted