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

no $12 deal for you

[frovingslosh]

It would have been nice if this had been posted before all of the $12 devices were spoken for. I went to the site as soon as this was posted but all 500 were taken.

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.

Re:Chromecast

[chaosdivine69]

I'll see your "smart TV" and raise you a "3D TV".

I have both features in my TV and I use neither of them - well, besides the built in Netflix app. Anyhow, I admit I fell for the hype, call me gullible. I have watched a grand total of 0 3D Blu Rays even though I own a 3D Blu Ray player and an unopened copy of Avatar 3D. The player is still in the box after a whole year. I hope it works because I think the warranty is about to expire in December. I don't buy Blu Rays since they're way more expensive than DVD and since Netflix came along, I don't really need to go on a wild goose chase to find a still operational rental store either. Too bad Netflix doesn't offer 3D capabilities on some of its titles. I might actually use the 4 pairs of stupid looking glasses that came with it.

For a real smart TV experience I connect my desktop computer to the big screen via HDMI cable and sit back with a wireless keyboard with built in touchpad. Now THAT'S a smart TV experience considering I can do everything and anything I desire with that kind of setup.

Moral of my story: If you can save a few bucks on a dumb TV then I'd seriously suggest you consider it. Connect your laptop or desktop to it via HDMI and go nuts if you really want a satisfactory experience.

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