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Kickstarted Firefox OS HDMI Dongle Delayed, DRM Support Being Added
An anonymous reader writes: You may recall last September when Mozilla and a new company named Matchstick announced a Kickstarter project for a new device that would compete with Google's Chromecast. It was an HDMI dongle for streaming media that runs on Firefox OS. They easily quadrupled their $100,000 funding goal, and estimated a ship date of February, 2015. Well, they emailed backers today to say that the Matchstick's release is being pushed back to August. They list a few reasons for the delay. For one, they want to upgrade some of the hardware: they're swapping the dual-core CPU for a quad-core model, and they're working on the Wi-Fi antenna to boost reception. But on the software side, the biggest change they mention is that they're adding support for DRM. This is a bit of a surprise, since all they said on the Kickstarter about DRM was that they hoped it would be handled "either via the playback app itself or the OS." Apparently this wasn't possible, so they're implementing Microsoft PlayReady tech on the Matchstick.
Mozilla is always playing catch-up these days.
Firefox? Well, Mozilla has spent the last few years doing everything they can to imitate Chrome. They've gone so far as to basically clone Chrome's UI. They're even trying to copy Chrome's process model, but Firefox's Electrolysis project is not going very well. They've been working on it for years, and even now it's still very buggy and broken.
Firefox for Android? Well, this is basically Mozilla's half-assed imitation of Chrome for Android. Pretty much nobody actually uses it.
Firefox for iOS? Trick question, it doesn't even exist! They have absolutely no presence on iOS today.
Firefox OS? Well, this is Mozilla's attempt to get into the mobile space, a good half-decade too late. Every review I've read of Firefox OS and the devices it runs on has been very, very negative. I mean, these are some of the most negative reviews I've ever read about any device, ever. We've seen Mozilla try to get poor third-worlders to adopt Firefox OS, but even they don't want anything to do with it, it's that bad!
Rust? Well, this is Mozilla's attempt to compete with Google's Go programming language. But while we've seen several stable releases from Go, and lots of useful software built using it, Rust is still spinning its wheels going nowhere fast. The 1.0 release will always be ready "within a few months". It's getting to the point where even Perl 6 is looking more likely to hit 1.0 than Rust is!
This useless device? Yet again, it's Mozilla trying to imitate what Google has successfully done, but again managing to do a very bad job at it.
Mozilla is a joke. Mozilla's projects are a joke. I've never seen an organization fail so badly, so many times over.
A bit larger than a dongle but does what you want: Raspberry Pi + any XBMC-based distro
Has HDMI CEC si you can use those "useless" media buttons on your TV's remote to control XMBC, no extra remote needed = you can hide the RPi in the back of the TV.
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Very disappointed by this. Wanted this because it was an open hardware / open software solution. If I'd wanted some Netflix/DRM ready stick I'd have just bought a Chromecast. Very unhappy with Matchstick.