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Roku To Go Open Source

Posted by timothy on Tue Sep 30, 2008 12:18 PM
from the what's-in-the-box dept.
Media Television Hardware Entertainment
ruphus13 writes "Time-shifting via Tivo changed the way we consume television programming. Now, Open Source enters the fray. Roku, the streaming-media set-top box has decided to Open Source its software. Roku had received praise for its streaming solution, and was in the press recently for its deal with Netflix, allowing users to stream Netflix movies directly to the box. From the article, 'Roku will release an open source version of its software by the end of the year. The CEO says he's looking for deals with content providers to stream their products through his device, and hopes to sell a bunch of them as a result.'"
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Submission: Roku to go open source by ruphus13 (890164)
[+] News: LG High-Def TVs To Stream Netflix Videos 190 comments
DJAdapt writes to tell us that LG has launched a new line of high definition TVs that will be capable of streaming Netflix videos with no additional hardware. This is just another in a long line of expansions from the once DVD rental service, which has expanded to the Roku set top box, Xbox 360, PC, Mac, and Linux platforms recently. "Piping movies directly to TV sets is the natural evolution of the video streaming service, said Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix. "The TV symbolizes the ultimate destination," he said. That idea -- shared by Sony Corp., which already streams feature films and TV shows directly to its Bravia televisions -- is still in its early stages. Netflix's streaming service taps a library of 12,000 titles, while the company's DVD menu numbers more than 100,000 titles. Hastings expects that gap will "definitely narrow" over time, but he noted that DVDs maintain an advantage over streaming, which is that "they are very profitable" for film studios."
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  • If only all companies had this vision (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gladbach (527602) on Tuesday September 30 2008, @12:24PM (#25206723)
    I dream of the day that I don't need to pay for cable, and can go strictly on demand for a reasonable price point.

    • iTunes is sooooooo... close. Even at $2/episode, that's like 30 episodes of TV for the cost of a $60 cable bill. Movie rentals are in the ballpark with Blockbuster or on-demand. They need more selection, the quality is not yet up to broadcast, and the price needs to drift down so that you wouldn't consider cable.

      Me, personally... I'd use it a lot more if they'd drop the DRM. I don't want an Apple TV, thank you very much - and my DVD player can do mpeg4 just fine. It even has a usb port.

        • Re:If only all companies had this vision (Score:4, Insightful)

          by MightyYar (622222) on Tuesday September 30 2008, @12:48PM (#25207041)

          I agree about price, but...

          SIX HOURS A DAY!!!! OH MY GOD!!! The price of iTunes is the least of your worries! Even a whole movie a day only gets you in the 2 hours a day ballpark.

          I mean, yeah, I watch a few shows... The Office, Weeds, South Park, Family Guy... but holy shit, 6 hours? Even if you're disabled that's a lot of time on your ass!

          • Even if you're disabled that's a lot of time on your ass!

            Don't have a kid, do ya? My TV is on Noggin, Nick, Cartoon, or Baby First TV all day. The programming is educational and entertaining at the same time for much of what my 3-yr watches. And he is learning Spanish while he is at it.

            I will stick with my DirecTV, thank you.

            • Man, too bad my kid is missing out on all this packaged education while she is reading books, playing with blocks, playing outside, and "helping" her parents.

              • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

                by Anonymous Coward

                Stacking blocks will be good practice for her future career as a late night stocker at Wal-Mart.

              • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                by Abreu (173023)

                No need to get all holier-than-thou on this.

                My kids (ages 4 and 1), also get the full-parenting experience: playing with blocks, reading/crayoning books, learning english...

                However, BabyFirstTV/DiscoveryKids/NickJR are absolute lifesavers when we need them to stay in their room for an hour or so.

                BabyFirstTV also has THE BEST sleep-inducing programming after 9pm

              • Every now and then we remove the bung from the bunghole in the barrel we keep ours in and pour some more gruel in. They seem appreciative: "Thank you sir! May I please have some more?", and it's alot cheaper than the alternatives.

              • Are those building blocks, or are you giving her mental blocks to play with?

                Sure building blocks are fun now, but mental blocks she'll keep for the rest of her life.
            • Isn't this the plot of that movie, "Cable Guy"?

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by juiceboxfan (990017)

          ...but at an average of 6 hours of viewing a day...

          Apparently you are off by about 50% [nationmaster.com]. But Four hours [cedmagazine.com] a day is still a lot.

          In the US only old people watch TV [broadcastengineering.com] anyway.;-)

        • I agree with this as well. I haven't bought any episodic television off of iTunes. My girlfriend does all the time, though - she watches shows while she works out. I can't swallow even $2 for a TV show, though - it just seems like it would add up very quickly to me. I'd also feel like I had to be way more choosy about what I watch, as I am at heart a "channel surfer", I'd feel pretty restricted.

          Interestingly enough, I don't mind renting movies that way (through PS3, etc.). Maybe because I can rent an ent

          • 8 DVDs at a time? Jesus. They might as well just give you sftp access to their ~/Movies folder and save you the trouble of re-ripping everything.

    • That's exactly what they're trying to prevent, with things like the 250GB cap. They'll let you get all the internets you want, but when it infringes on their space (content), they don't want any of that kind of competition.

      Otherwise people could just download all the HD movies and shows they want through a subscription service like Netflix (or hopefully through a cheaper, bittorrent backed solution), and get rid of the cable TV.

      • Do some math. A DVD holds 8GB, which is actually a lot more than the movie itself needs (hence all those extras). That means that even with a 250GB cap, you can watch a DVD-quality movie every day of the month without going over. And most online video streams are not DVD quality.

    • What are you watching? I haven't had cable for 3 months now and am doing okay. You can watch a lot on Hulu (Colbert Report, Daily Show, Battlestar Galactica) and NBC.com (Heroes, The Office). Netflix has some shows, too, as part of their instant view. Hulu and NBC have ads, but are free. Netflix has no ads and starts at ~$8 a month.
      There is a lot out there and am not referring to torrents.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by edmicman (830206)
        In my experience trying to get web-based video like Hulu and the respective network sites hooked up to a TV for a true TV-like experience is a PITA. Sure, you can s-video out, or have something like Media Center or MythTV....but ultimately I've found you still have a computer hooked up to a TV, with the same interface pitfalls.

        Watching your shows on a computer monitor may work in the dorms, but for relaxing on the couch with the wife, it doesn't cut it.

    • Re:If only all companies had this vision (Score:4, Informative)

      by lysergic.acid (845423) on Tuesday September 30 2008, @01:05PM (#25207271) Homepage

      TV is already becoming an anachronism when almost everyone has broadband internet access through which they can receive on-demand content uncontrolled by the major television networks. now all that needs to be done is for a legal and user-friendly solutions to be developed.

      Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) is one service that directly connects content-producers with end users without going through traditional distribution channels. thus television networks are no longer the gatekeepers of media distribution.

    • tvrss [tvrss.net] + pytvshows [sourceforge.net] + rtorrent [rakshasa.no] = Tivo for me.

      I work second so it's not like I notice anyway, everything is done by time I get home. All over the waves stuff anyway. I just count it as someone else does the recording and encoding for me.

        • rtorrent doesn't support rss feeds and I don't use a gui torrent client (My file server is shoved in a back room with XBMC as the front end)

  • Is their software significantly better than MythTV?

    If so, how?

    If not, why don't they just sell a MythTV box?

    • MythTV resides in an entirely different market from this.

      Myth's featureset has always been built around DVR features; your Myth box sits downstream from a cable box or tuner. The Roku box, on the other hand, is the content source.

      Right now, it's being sold as a Netflix streaming device. In the future, though, any company could theoretically provide client software for it to stream other proprietary or open content.

      • Not quite.

        I can use MythTV as a jukebox and get a lot of the same
        niftiness that people get out of the roku or the AppleTV.

        If the picture on the Roku sucks then MythTV has a clear
        advantage. Although the "target market" might not care.
        Then again, that might drive them to AppleTV.

        When looking at their demo units (atv), I see a lot
        of stuff for sale there that's already on my mythvideo
        jukebox.

        • Who said the picture on the Roku sucks? I've been quite pleased with mine.

        • Using it as a jukebox, not considering it as a dvr, then yeah, the roku could certainly be far better. At that point, you'd be better off buying a popcornhour or other such media set top than wasting your time on a mythtv, having it sit by your TV making noise etc. Toss a few Hard drives into your existing computers, open them up on various network share types, and let a set top box like the roku (once opened) or a popcornhour, or any of the many devices to the heavy lifting. So yeah, not considering t
        • Can you stream Netflix video on your MythTV box?

    • You can have multiple heads for only $99 a piece and the head is smaller than a large paper back book. THAT is how it is significantly better than MythTV. I would have a MythTV backend that can stream to multiple Roku front ends. This would make me very happy.

    • It runs on a fairly low-end box. I don't own one nor have I tried Myth TV so I can't compare.

      But I've got three of the older Roku audio players and I suspect there is a lot of common code.

      These never crash, hang, or act-up like PC devices often do (at least in my experience) and behave more like you would associate with an appliance.

      • You "watch TV" on a Roku. I "watch TV" on MythTV.

        How does your gibberish make any sense in light of that fact?

        The Roku is cheap and simple and is of course somewhat limited.

        That still doesn't mean that someone with more than 5TB of space
        in his MythTV setup (like me) isn't going to eyeball this thing
        too (Roku). ...a little unlikely, but still possible.

        100 bux is like 3 BluRay titles...

        • Currently, the Roku box is only used to stream certain NetFlix titles. You don't really watch "TV" in general on it, although there may be certain TV shows available in NetFlix's streaming catalog (I've never used it, but from everyting I've heard, it's a pretty skimpy catalog). The Roku box is not a DVR, though.

          It may be possible to use the Roku as a MythTV FrontEnd, but that would just be one of the available channels, which is the point of releasing an SDK so that people can make up whatever video c

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by H0p313ss (811249)

            I believe they are trying to say that it is a comparison of apples to oranges.

            Sounds more like they were saying it is a comparison of apples to Orangutans.

  • The core Roku software will be open source, but applications such as the streaming service from Netflix will still have proprietary DRM code. You won't be able to build your own Roku equivalent box, or stream Netflix movies onto your Linux watch.

    I believe the point of this is to make it easier for other video providers to work with the Roku player, which seems like a wise move for Roku.

    Hopefully we'll move towards the point where any service (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) works with any box (Roku, PS3, Xbox, etc.) T

  • Is there a way to run anything other than tivo's software on my series 3 tivo? I'd like to give this a shot, because I'm tired of paying tivo monthly, and no way I'm buying the lifetime deal when I'm expecting tivo to go under any day now.

    Also, is it possible to get cablecard decoders from Time Warner that don't cut out 10% of the time on certain channels?

  • So, from reading the reviews, it sounds like the video quality isn't that great. To me, this indicates that it's something you'd want to watch on at most a PC-sized screen anyway. But yet this is exclusively a TV display device.

    Still a cool device, and I suspect they'll now sell a bunch to the torrent-download crowd too. The big partnerships with the networks probably won't have been affected by the existence of an open source tree. So really I think they're doing it to win over the hacker crowd (and I

    • If you have a fast internet connection, the level 4 (highest level) video is indistinguishable from a DVD. This is playing on a 32in 720p LCD. If they use the MPEG4 Roku is capable of, it will look even better than the WMV that Netflix requires.

  • Roku, the streaming-media set-top box has decided

    The AI is coming along fantastically, too.

  • It's a good little device. When friends bring their kids over (we don't have kids), I'll queue up some kids' videos on the Roku. When family come over, like to flip through the queue on our TV and spend a lot of time just commenting on what's in the queue, as if that's entertainment enough. :) One funny thing though...I'm not sure if Netflix just realized they have an african-american audience or what, but last night about 30 movies made for that demographic suddenly appeared in the "new additions" RSS feed
    • Yep, I agree that I love my roku. I have played it on both my 42in plasma (through component), and my 32in lcd through hdmi. The picture on both was perfect. No, it wasn't a blue ray, but who cares. Blue ray is pretty over rated short of block buster action flicks in my opinion. The 4 quality setting is great in my experience. I've even had friends make that comment, subsequently had them over, and had them walk away wondering what people were complaining about.

  • I'm not saying they won't get around to it this time, but on the Photobridge we were (unofficially?) promised that they would open source it, and they never did.

    http://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?t=500 [roku.com]

    Having been burned before, I'll believe it when I see it.

  • VCRs introduced time shifting and advert skipping a helluvalongtimeago already. Tivo may have made it a little more convenient, that's all.

  • Open Source? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fnord666 (889225) on Tuesday September 30 2008, @01:32PM (#25207633) Journal
    I wouldn't get too excited just yet. I have not only read the linked article (which is a real dog's breakfast in both organization and apparently facts), but the articles that it links to and the ones that they link to. I didn't find anything that said Roku will be going open source. The nearest thing I can find is commentary with the word open in it that indicates that they are opening up the box to other content providers.

    Roku, the maker of a set-top box used to stream online video on a traditional TV, will open its platform to any content provider over the next few months, says Roku CEO Anthony Wood, speaking at Streaming Media West. "We're opening up the platform to anyone who wants to put their video service on this box," says Wood. "We're going to release the software developer kit, so anyone can publish any channel, and users can access web content on their TVs."

    Jennifer Guevin over at cnet has a decent article [cnet.com] that talks about where Roku is really going with this. Keep an eye on Roku's press releases [roku.com] for the real deal if and when it's announced.

  • Roku already uses some open source (Score:4, Informative)

    by Thornae (53316) on Tuesday September 30 2008, @11:44PM (#25214401)

    They fully endorse [roku.com] the open source Firefly Media Server [fireflymediaserver.org] for use with their nifty Soundbridge devices [roku.com].

    Runs on FreeBSD/Linux. Integrates with iTunes (if you must). What more do you want?

    • I doubt they are opening up the netflix drm code. I am reasonably sure they are opening everything up to the degree that we will be able to add other sources of content besides netflix.

    • I have a feeling they'll provide the source to their UI and networking stuff. But the WMV DRM decoding will remain proprietary.

      This way other content providers can customize the Roku to work with their service (and plug in their own DRM module).

      Hopefully the device can be improved greatly. I had one for a week. Maybe it was just too simple, but I wasn't impressed. I sold it to a friend. I'll just get an Xbox 360 for my Netflix streaming.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by sacherjj (7595)

        Roku has the capability to play MPEG4. It doesn't have to deal with the inferior WMV.

        • Which MPEG4? I'd say that VC-1 (WMV9) is superior to ASP, but indeed prefer AVC to WMV.

          As for my complaints about how the Roku currently stands. It only supports DHCP, there's no way to statically configure an IP. While HD support is promised right now it is limited to 480i/p. It does support an anamorphic mode, but that distorts the UI, and actually decreases the available resolution of non-widescreen content (it sends black pillar bars to the left and right of the squashed 4:3 picture which is then st

          • It only supports DHCP, there's no way to statically configure an IP.

            Then set up your DHCP server (in your home NAT router?) to reserve an IP address for your set-top box's MAC number.

    • This isn't about just Netflix anymore. Roku's little $99 box just became a potential home for Hulu, Joost, or heck, any one of the huge numbers of companies doing IPTV or even video podcasts now.

      This is it. This is the $99 box o' IPTV we were all wating for. Oh, and it even does Netflix!

      • this sort of ability is one of those things I simply can't understand Sony's inability to see that it'd sell more PS3s to have such a capability - instead everything they do seems to be slow leak and excruciatingly Sony-specific in the area of video-on-(quasi)demand - talk about slowly cutting one's own throat
    • The story says that Roku will release an open source version - in the hope that it'll help them sell more boxes.

      This (slashdot article) is a story about a story of something that will/might happen in the future. I wouldn't hold my breathe waiting for the outcome.

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