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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.
I personally would rather see the TV makers stick to making the displays and let other companies like Roku, Boxee, Tivo, etc handle the "smart" parts.
We have a Samsung smart TV too. We use Hulu quite a bit but have found that the Hulu app appears to suffer from lag sometimes. However, on our older TV (not smart) we have a Roku we use for Hulu and it never experiences the problem. If the TV lags bad I just pause the show on the smart tv and then go resume it on the Roku.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Computer hardware changes a lot faster than the display components. There is only a limited market for integrated devices unless they are strictly re-formatting/ receiving streams over IP.
Of course, manufactures would LOVE for you to buy an Integrated device with TV today, so they can sell you a brand new shiny toy in 3-5 years when your display gear no longer works with DRM version X.
Look at all the VCR / TV combo's sitting in the garage sales cause they dont play DVD's , etc..
apt-get update
apt-get install latest-tv-show
Then to get the latest episodes:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Year of Linux on the...TV...?
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
I just don't see the big consumer demand for these smart TVs. Even among my gadget loving friends, the interest in smart TVs can be described as lukewarm at best. Sure, the integrated capability to stream content from providers other than the cable/satellite company does appeal to some. But I just don't see people banging down doors to get this integrated into the TV. If anything, I see more people using their TVs as big monitors for their PCs and game consoles.
Perhaps it's just the cynic in me but I see this more as a push by the advertisers as a means to get more of their content delivered. All of the providers will relish the opportunity to embed ads, either in their UI or in their content. Yet another business model being pushed on people who don't really want it, if they care at all.
But id like it for a different reason. I just want a simple pane of glass that displays video. I don't want or need all the extra stuff.
Doing this just makes them more expensive, more prone to break and repair even worse. Oh, and more controllable by other parties upstream
Like having an integrated DVD player break on a 2000 TV and you are hosed with a huge bill.. when all you really needed was a 25 dollar one attached to the back of it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Beware anything the marketing department label as smart.
Only general purpose computers are "smart". Everything else is a gadget or toy.
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
How about a decent interface for a desktop Linux-based OS instead of a horrible interface for netbooks, laptops, 24", tablets and TVs? How about they get that right for a start...