Matchstick and Mozilla Take On Google's Chromecast With $25 Firefox OS Dongle

An anonymous reader writes Matchstick and Mozilla today announced their open-source take on the Chromecast: a $25 Firefox OS-powered HDMI dongle. The streaming Internet and media stick will be available first through Kickstarter, in the hopes to drive down the price tag. Jack Chang, Matchstick General Manager in the US, described the device to me as "essentially an open Chromecast." He explained that while the MSRP is $25 (Google's Chromecast retails for $35), the Kickstarter campaign is offering a regular price of $18, and an early bird price of $12.

Comments

Proprietary firmware blob?

[Hobart]

From the Kickstarter page, the computer they are trying to fund is going to be based around a Rockchip 3066 SoC.

Will this have the same proprietary blob required to function / use video like the various Broadcom (Videocore in Raspberry Pi) / Marvell chips are stuck with?

If so, it's not actually Free/Open hardware, because that mystery embedded RTOS can do anything to my system at any time. If Mozilla and/or Matchstick are working with Rockchip (or whomever Rockchip licenses their cores from) to fully document the toolchain, I'd be delighted. (I'm not holding my breath.)

I don't just want a Free and open-source graphics device driver, I want the full documented toolchain for everything on the chip.

what brand smart TV?

[frovingslosh]

You might want to be more specific about your brand of smart TV. I got an LG and the Plex support is awful (even though Plex claims LG is a supported brand). Some stuff would play OK when it was encoded in something that was native for the LG, but transcoding just didn't work right. I ended up switching from Plex to the open sores Universal Media Player and that is at least working with transcoding. Clunky interface and slow to respond sometimes, but at least I can watch stuff that I couldn't watch with Plex.

I think the bottom line here is that there is a lot of variety between the various options. In my opinion the Roku 3 is probably the top end, and the "Smart TVs" are likely at the bottom of the list. The hope for this device is that it will be open and not go out of its way to prevent useful things from being done with it like Chrome cast did when they stopped many early apps from working. And I doubt that you are seeing may apps or channels being added for your "Smart TV" (I'm sure not).

Graphics appear to be closed/proprietary.

[Hobart]

The Rockchip 3066 appears to use ARM's proprietary Mali T-series graphics. No, thanks.

Quote from the dev lead on the Mali graphics:

"I really do understand your frustration and I'm sorry that this makes life harder for you and similar developers. We are genuinely not against Open Source, as I hope I've tried to explain. I myself spent a long time working on the Linux kernel in the past and I wish I could give you a simple answer. Unfortunately, it is a genuinely complex problem, with a lot of trade-offs and judgements to be made as well as economic and legal issues. Ultimately I cannot easily reduce this to an answer here, and probably not to one that will satisfy you. Rest assured that you are not being ignored. However, as a relatively small company with a business model that is Partner driven, the resources that we have, need to be applied to projects in ways that meet Partner requirements."
—(2014-09) ARM Still Not Doing Open Drivers