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Television Media Hardware

A Hackable Media Player For HDTV 216

Posted by timothy from the lacks-tuner-and-hard-drive dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Embedded Linux and an open, hacker-friendly architecture power the world's first high definition media player, the $499 Roku HD1000. The brainchild of ReplayTV inventor Anthony Wood, the device could touch off a cottage industry of third-party applications and media packs that work with its Linux-based OS and user-friendly media APIs. Out of the box, the HD1000 can stream MPEG and MPEG2, play music, loop JPEGs, and more to an HDTV -- all at the same time. Roku is selling "Art Packs" of everything from museum-quality art to hot-rod cars as memory cards that work with the device. And, the company will release a C/C++ SDK for the HD1000 before 2004. Finally, there's something to actually show on your $5,000 54-inch plasma TV or 37-inch LCD TV." (Roku is also one of the companies mentioned in an earlier posting about using hi-def displays as digital art galleries).
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A Hackable Media Player For HDTV More

A Hackable Media Player For HDTV

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  • yeah right (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @05:45AM (#7607454)
    "MUSEUM QUALITY ART"!??!

    Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

    We all know this is going to used exclusively for porn; you aren't fooling anyone.
    • We all know this is going to used exclusively for porn; you aren't fooling anyone.
      Who are you fooling? You know very well that at that very intense moment right before the orgasm, where you're shaking your pecker like hell, the resolution of the picture you're looking at doesn't matter in the least!!!!

  • Great... (Score:3, Informative)

    by slantyyz ( 196624 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @05:49AM (#7607465)
    Now people have something to shorten the life span of their expensive Plasma displays [flattvpeople.com]... I think it would be cheaper to just to buy a few art prints (cheaper and higher resolution too) and rotate them every few months. Of course, the expensive "I've got way too much time on my hands" coolness factor would be diminished somewhat.

    • Re:Great... (Score:3, Funny)

      by ballpoint ( 192660 )
      Excerpt from the flattvpeople site:

      "High altitudes can affect the performance of plasma displays because the gas held inside each pixel is stressed, and has to work harder to perform."

      Pity the hard-working gas, held captive inside an eeny-weeny-tiny pixel cell.

    • Ack! If the article you reference is correct, plasma TV's have a horribly short lifespan. Well under 3 years of run-time before they lose HALF of their brightness? If a standard computer monitor did that, people would scream and yell about the poor quality and tell everyone to stay away!

      I was taking a really close look at large screen (42" and up) TVs this holiday season, considering an upgrade to my boring old 27" set in our living room. But the more I read, the less I'm impressed with anything out ri
      • "I was taking a really close look at large screen (42" and up) TVs this holiday season, considering an upgrade to my boring old 27" set in our living room. But the more I read, the less I'm impressed with anything out right now. Everyone's telling me the projection sets will likely be discontinued by this time next year, so buying one of them is investing in a dying technology. "

        This is news to me...where did you hear or read this? I'd truly be interested!!

        I've had my 60" Mitsubishi projection tv for abo

        • I can't pinpoint an exact URL to refer you to on this, but it's been often repeated advice I've gotten from salespeople when asking about big-screen TVs, as well as advice I've heard echoed amongst friends into technology and hi-fi.

          As someone else posted here, maybe they're just referring to the old projection set technology with the CRT inside and mirrors? Either that, or maybe they're talking about the end nearing for non-HDTV ready big-screens. But with the price-drops I've seen lately on some of thes

      • Quick [OT] warning note about plasma TV's for non-coast dwellers.

        If you want to use a plasma TV at high altitude, say above 5000' elevation (eg, Denver), many of the less expensive models hum so loudly it can make the experience not worthwhile.

        I vaguely recall some French manufacturer produced a plasma TV that supposedly did not hum, but was expensive and made with thick and heavy glass.

      • If the article you reference is correct, plasma TV's have a horribly short lifespan. Well under 3 years of run-time before they lose HALF of their brightness?

        Perhaps this is by design? Planned obsolecense (sp?) is nothing new. Even if they didn't "design" it in, it will help fuel their market if people have to buy new TVs every few years.

        Everyone's telling me the projection sets will likely be discontinued by this time next year, so buying one of them is investing in a dying technology.

        I hope not ..
        • 82" rear-projection model [...] I shudder to wonder what the sticker price would have been. It's probably at least double what I paid ($3299).

          Ooops, I just found one for sale and I was wrong. The 82" model runs for more than $20,000!! [electronichouse.com]
      • 'Projection' HDTV systems are not going away in the next year, CRT based projection systems are. This is because they are bulky, need annual maintenance, and have a relatively poor picture compared to the newer technologies.

        If you are concerned with not losing brightness and avoiding burn-in, check into DLP HDTV monitors. They are, IMO, the best bang for the buck on a non-aging display. Basically, you have a DLP chip with 1280x720 microscopic mirrors, a color wheel, and a 100 watt bulb. The tiny mirrors wi
    • Plasmas have a life of roughly of 30,000 hours. It comes out to be something close to 8 hours of TV every day for 10 years.
  • ... well, I guess it won't be coming over to the UK :-( HDTV is absolutely nowhere in the UK :-(

    The only thing that will accept HDTV is my projector, and using it as a digital picture gallery would be a bit expensive on the bulbs...

    Simon.

    • Re:NO UK HD TV (Score:3, Informative)

      by Blue Stone ( 582566 )
      If I recall correctly, HDTV was being proposed for the UK during the mid-to-late 80's, but effective lobbying from a certain Mr. Rupert Murdoch, who had recently introduced his very expensive and (then) loss making satellite tv system "SKY" (which wouldn't be able to carry HDTV signals) killed the matter stone dead.

    • Re:NO UK HD TV (Score:3, Informative)

      by Goth Biker Babe ( 311502 )
      It's all to do with relative gains.

      NTSC to HDTV is quite an improvement. PAL and PAL+ to HDTV is less of an improvement. 768x572 vs 800x600 is a negligable gain and 768x572 vs 1280 x 1028 is a gain but not enough to warrant the additional expenditure by the service providers/cable companies and the like. The additional bandwidth required would reduce the number of available channels and no broadcaster will go for that scenario. Then there's obtaining the content which is thin on the ground.

      I would ra
      • 768x572 vs 800x600 is a negligable gain and 768x572 vs 1280 x 1028 is a gain but not enough to warrant the additional expenditure by the service providers/cable companies and the like.
        Of course, 720p is 1280x720 and 1080i is 1920x1080. Not sure where you're getting 800x600 or 1280x1024.
        • Of course, 720p is 1280x720 and 1080i is 1920x1080. Not sure where you're getting 800x600 or 1280x1024

          Those are both 16:9 formats. Although uncommon the 4:3 ones (including computer resolutions) are usually available in the hardware.
      • Oh please, I've been in London and I've seen at least a smattering of TV in PAL format. I also have HDTV here in the US. Trying to pass off HDTV as just a little better than PAL is complete crap. You have zero credibility. Maybe it doesn't matter enough because of issues of program quality having nothing to do with resolution (essentially all of prime time programs except for reality and news magazines are already in HD). But it sounds just like sour grapes (like the fox said in Aesop "I don't care about th

  • Storage capacity? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ChangeOnInstall ( 589099 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @05:50AM (#7607470)
    I'm just curious to know what magnitude of storage capacity is required to effectively record HDTV data? Tivo requires about 1GB/hour for basic quality and 3GB/hour for best quality. I don't recall if Tivo what encoding Tivo uses to store data though. Will such a device simply store the broadcast digital stream, or will it reencode it?

    (Please excuse me for being a bit of a newb on HDTV here)

    • Re:Storage capacity? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Y2K is bogus ( 7647 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @06:20AM (#7607541)
      Broadcast HDTV is allocated 19.2Mbps for 1080i (1920 x 1080 x 60Hz interlaced)
      The speeds go up in 40Mbps, 200Mbps, and 1.5Gbps quality steps depending on the
      edit level (contributor, studio, and raw).

      To store broadcast 1080i, you'd need 19.2Mbps. DVD is around 9Mbps.
      19.2Mbps * 60s = 1152Gbpm or 140MB/min or around 8.2GB per hour.
      • I'm going to have to say you are wrong with your numbers...

        A terrestrial ATSC stream runs at roughly 19.39 megabits per second, regardless of what it contains. Thus, recording the stream it's self requires about 8.7 gigs per hours. 19.39/8 = 2.42375 megabytes per second * 3600 seconds/hour = 8725.5 megabytes.

        It is possible to extract the MPEG2 stream from the ATSC stream with out much effort (if you know what you are doing), however such an ability is the reason for the implementation of the so called bro
        • Do some more research, it's 19.2Mbps and higher. The data rate at the camera is 1.5Gbps and then it goes down from there when compressed. The lowest quality and highest compression is broadcast.
        • Why are people who have never recorded any HD so anxious to jump in and insult each other? It takes a little over 9 gigabytes to record an hour long program. After removing commercials (easily done because at least for now they are essentially all in SD) and filtering out null packets it is about 5.5 gigabytes. Some people on the AVS forum have worked out a procedure to transcode (or re-encode, I'm not sure which) to Windows Media 9 format with excellent results and even further size reduction. But reducing
          • Just a lil FYI, unlike most on this topic, I have extensive experience in dealing with ATSC transport streams. This summer for my employer I designed and built a self contained application which builds an MPEG 2 stream into an ATSC stream. Other projects for this company I have worked on is an ATSC analysis device and a separate display/decoder test device.

            For a side project this week, I've been working on my own app to remove the MPEG2 data from the transport stream as I got sick of trying to make HDTVtoM
            • Well, that's good for you and I don't mean that in a sarcastic manner. The issue remains that a fairly simple request for information was made and instead of providing a concise answer there seemed to be a lot of arguing over numbers that could eventually lead to an answer. I suppose I'm as easily tempted to get into less than illuminating arguments but I thought it would be useful in this case to cut directly to the answers to satisfy the curious. Again it requires a bit more than 9 gigabytes per hour to r
    • I have a 10 minute HDTV clip that is 1.3Gb (1440x1080). That's 7.8 GiB/hr so it must be well compressed.

      Not sure what format it's encoded in... DV is 25 megabits/sec (or 3.6 MiB/sec) and that's about a quarter the resolution of HDTV.
  • My neighbor just bought a $4000 Plasma from Gateway. I tried to find the nicest way to tell him it sucked. I said it was mature technology. Was I being too nice?

  • Why no DVI output? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ethank ( 443757 ) * on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @06:13AM (#7607525) Homepage
    I don't understand why they would create a system to showcase HDTV sets and not include DVI output on the system? Most, if not all newer HDTV sets include DVI inputs in order to facilitate pixel-perfect representation on the screen.

    I would buy one of these (once I buy my nice little 42" LCD rear-proj from Sony :) ) but with no DVI output I think my other plan of putting my G4 out in the living room seems like a better plan.

    • Re:Why no DVI output? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Babbster ( 107076 ) <aaronbabb@NoSPaM.gmail.com> on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @08:00AM (#7607772) Homepage
      The most obvious explanation is maximum compatibility using the least space and hardware. Looking at the picture of the back panel, it's pretty crowded and a solid 99% of HDTV sets with DVI (typically only one) in also have component in (typically two or more). There is also the fact that the DVI standard on HDTV sets is designed to accommodate HDCP (the evil anti-copying flags), so a consumer is most likely to use their DVI input for their HDTV set-top box/tuner while using the component inputs for other devices (particularly consoles and devices like the one in this article).

      Finally, you should be aware that the DVI inputs on HDTV sets will not necessarily accept PC/Mac DVI signals, so keep this in mind (and try before buying) if you're looking for an HDTV to interface with your G4.

    • I don't understand why they would create a system to showcase HDTV sets and not include DVI output on the system?
      To avoid on-the-fly MPEG2 encoding (or transcoding) ?

    • Re:Why no DVI output? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by abischof ( 255 ) *

      I would buy one of these (once I buy my nice little 42" LCD rear-proj from Sony :) ) but with no DVI output I think my other plan of putting my G4 out in the living room seems like a better plan.

      If you're thinking about LCD anyway, you may also want to consider a projector -- and they don't cost as much as you might think. For instance, Sanyo's just-released PLV-Z2 (review [projectorcentral.com]) lists for around $3k but the street price [projectorcentral.com] is closer to $2,000. It has DVI input and 1280x720 resolution which gives full 720p at

    • Re:Why no DVI output? (Score:3, Informative)

      by pellis23 ( 120853 )
      We didn't choose to add DVI because of the additional cost and complexity. We felt that customers would overall be well served with component and and vga. Of course, DVI is being considered for future products.

      -Patrick
      -Sr. Software Engineer, Roku.

  • Now all we need.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Channard ( 693317 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @06:34AM (#7607563) Journal
    .. is for some bright spark to add a recorder function/add-on-box to this that will negate the bit that sets HD programs as non recordable.
    • ...since this box doesn't receive or output a digital picture signal. Analog connectors only, so you avoid any evil bits (in exchange for a generation loss in picture quality).

  • Xbox? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @06:42AM (#7607586)
    A modded Xbox can do the same thing (play mpeg2, divx etc.) off dvd-r or streamed off the network with HDTV output up to 1920p. See www.xboxmediacenter.com and www.xbins.org/xbmp.php.

    • Re:Xbox? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GrassMunk ( 677765 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @07:36AM (#7607727)
      key word being *modded* which is grey area at best. This system is legit and requires no modding. Yes i love my XBMP but i would have rather had a system that was just easy and didnt take up more room than my receiver.( the xbox is HUGE ).

    • Re:Xbox? (Score:3, Informative)

      by pellis23 ( 120853 )
      Sure, but can the XBox do it with no noise, in less than 1RU while allowing to play back HD Transport streams that you've recorded from the ATSC tuner/capture card in your PC?

      -Patrick
      -Sr. Software Engineer, Roku.

  • how is it controlled? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zuzulo ( 136299 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @06:50AM (#7607604) Homepage
    One key component that I did not see addressed in the article is how you control this device. Is there a remote that lets you interact with a TV friendly menu system?

    This question arises because one of the main headaches associated with my current streaming media system (home built) is that using the wireless mouse and keyboard to navigate is difficult from a reasonable TV/audio viewing and listening distance ...

    If they have addressed this issue at all, I will have to buy one. I would love to get away from requiring a full PC in my entertainment rack since all it does is stream data from my fileservers anyway.

    And yes, I have tried other embedded devices, but most have proprietary OS, and linux ones do not generally support my specific set of audio and video requirements.

    • One key component that I did not see addressed in the article is how you control this device. Is there a remote that lets you interact with a TV friendly menu system?

      Of course there's a remote. You can also control it via the serial port or by telneting into the HD1000. And, if you'd like to control it in ways we don't currently provide, grab the SDK (once it's available) and code away.

      -Patrick
      -Sr. Software Engineer, Roku.

  • Cool another slashdot purchase...... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MegaHamsterX ( 635632 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @06:52AM (#7607610)
    Where is the slashdot credit card with karma points for every purchase.

    I paid cash for the following, but don't think I wouldn't have used the slashdot card so I could troll more often.

    First it was the netpliance [slashdot.org]

    Then the apex dvd player [slashdot.org] that plays mp3s

    then the tivo [slashdot.org] and tivonet [slashdot.org]

    now it's a box to display hdtv stuff without a computer

    cool, but I think this has more in common with the netpliance than with the other three which are still used.

    For its price I would expect more, like something to read straight from a dvd, harddrive or something, no wait that would be useful.

  • DVB (Score:4, Interesting)

    by shaka ( 13165 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @06:59AM (#7607631)

    Being that I live in Europe, I'd rather spend my hard earned money on building my own box for Digital TV (DVB) using this great, open-source, system:
    http://www.cadsoft.de/people/kls/vdr/ [cadsoft.de]

    The DVB standard also includes metadata, so the EPG (electronic program guide) is broadcast together with the actual TV-stream, and it allows for easy recording, editing and storing, as well as playback of mp3, mpeg (or anything else mplayer can handle) and loads of more interesting stuff.

  • 1080i? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Glock27 ( 446276 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @07:11AM (#7607659)
    So, am I correct in my assessment that this device won't play or record 1080i? *sigh*

    DAMN the DMCA. Sorry, I had to get that off my chest.

    Lobby for Fair Use. It's our only hope.

    • From the specs [rokulabs.com]:

      Video Output
      Component Y/Pr/Pb: 1080i, 720p, 480p, 480i
      VGA: 1080i, 720p, 480p

      No recording though.

      • From the specs:

        Video Output
        Component Y/Pr/Pb: 1080i, 720p, 480p, 480i VGA: 1080i, 720p, 480p

        No recording though.

        Thanks for the link, I was lazy. ;-) So, it will successfully pass-thru 1080i...great. I wonder if it's processor is even powerful enough to decode a 1080i digital stream...?

        Perhaps someone will successfully hack some interesting functionality. That is the big allure of this thing, after all.

    • Re:1080i? (Score:2, Informative)

      by pellis23 ( 120853 )

      So, am I correct in my assessment that this device won't play or record 1080i? *sigh*

      No, I'm afraid your assessment is incorrect. The HD1000 is a HD Media Player. We couldn't (or at least shouldn't) call it HD without supporting at least 720p or 1080i. Of course, we support both, in addition to 480p and 480i. Of course, the HD1000 doesn't record anything, but can display your photos in 1080i and playback HD ATSC trasport streams in 1080i or 720p (or 480p or 480i if you really want to)

      - Patrick
      - Sr

      • No, I'm afraid your assessment is incorrect. The HD1000 is a HD Media Player. We couldn't (or at least shouldn't) call it HD without supporting at least 720p or 1080i. Of course, we support both, in addition to 480p and 480i. Of course, the HD1000 doesn't record anything, but can display your photos in 1080i and playback HD ATSC trasport streams in 1080i or 720p (or 480p or 480i if you really want to)

        - Patrick - Sr Software Engineer, Roku

        Thank you for the response! I am a little confused though...I thou

  • Very ironic (Score:4, Interesting)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @07:12AM (#7607660) Homepage Journal
    that linux is majorly used on all these media devices, in the movie industry, and in cell phones, and sound still doesn't work properly on linux desktops!

    (No, I'm not trolling. I use linux exclusively but its foolish to pretend that it is perfect. And yes, I know about the recent projects like gstreamer, jack and efforts by freedesktop.org to improve the situation. But all that is a long way off from widespread adoption.)

  • XBox (Score:5, Interesting)

    by unixbob ( 523657 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @07:20AM (#7607686)
    Sounds like a modded XBox. XBox media player uses a port of Mplayer to allow the system to play Mpeg's (1 & 2), AVI, DIVX, MP3 as well as browse JPEG's etc. Only thing it can't do is record. It's got quite an active homebrew dev community

    • PC (Score:2)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
      If this thing lets you load your own software, you could presumably use it as your main PC, at least for non-computron-intensive applications.
      • There is a version of Gentoo Linux for the XBox. The system runs a Celeron 533 & 128M of RAM. so it should run OK.
        • As I recall, the XBox is a PIII @ 733, with only 64 MB of RAM (though folks have modded them to 128 successfully).

    • It simply does not have the horsepower to do this.
    • "We are glad we chose Linux," adds Woodward, "Since it has enabled us to bring a feature rich product to market quickly by leveraging the excellent work of the Linux development community.
    ... do I win anything?

  • I'm confused (Score:5, Funny)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @07:29AM (#7607704) Homepage Journal
    Something doesn't add up. If linux costs $699, then how can they sell the whole thing for $499?!
    • Something doesn't add up. If linux costs $699, then how can they sell the whole thing for $499?!

      Simple, It's pirated just like MS Longhorn. It was released to the internet without the copyright owners permission. ;-)
    • It's a loss leader. They'll make it up with those $10,000 memory cards (hey, fine art comes at a price people.)
    • That's counting SCO's $200 mail-in rebate. You need the original sales receipt, UPC symbol cut off the box, your birth certificate, and a urine sample.

  • "Media" Player? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dunark ( 621237 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @08:04AM (#7607789)
    This thing doesn't have a CD or DVD drive. The last time I checked, Blockbuster wasn't renting movies on memory cards.

    Where exactly is the user supposed to get "media" they can play on this device?

  • OpenSource beats them to the punch (Score:5, Informative)

    by pridkett ( 2666 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @09:45AM (#7608195) Homepage Journal
    Hmm...that's funny, I could have sworn that MythTV [mythtv.org] has had this for a while. It's pretty easy, pick up a pcHDTV [pchdtv.com] card for $200 and make sure you've got some significant hard disk space and you should be ready to go.

    Reminds me of Microsoft bragging about their future "Implicit Query" technology when dashboard [nat.org] already has it.

  • Not a PVR? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So, it looks to me like this thing isn't a PVR. It doesn't record -- it's just a player. It will play High-Def quality MPEGs, but, ummmm...., if this ain't a recorder, how do I get the HD MPEGs in the first place? Neither ReplayTV nor TiVo record at HD. Does this make sense only if you already have a HDTV tuner for your PC? If you've got that, though, and a way of getting HD signal out of the PC, why do you need this?
  • ... can it be reprogrammed to ignore the "do not home-videotape" bit????
  • I've had a Roku box since the beginning of November. It's hooked to a 42" Panasonic Plasma (852x480) running at 1080i. The other end of the Roku is hooked to a wireless 802.11g game adapter. Any shared files/directories are automatically mounted and can be browsed with the UI.

    The Roku can be programmed via shell scripts or you can use the included remote for selecting music and/or pictures.

    The UI is still a little rough, but they are working on it (two beta releases since initial release), and it keep
  • Calling the Roku device (about which I submitted an earlier article to /. almost a month ago, but which got rejected - /me rubs the rump of his ego) a media player is a bit of a misnomer since, as others have disdainfully pointed out, it does not sport a CD/DVD drive for media playback or a hard drive for PVR functionality. Fair enough.

    But, the beauty of the device is that it is silent and provides a great thin client for accessing content stored on remote servers in the home -- where the noisy fans and

  • From the horses mouth. (Score:5, Informative)

    by pellis23 ( 120853 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @03:04PM (#7610948)
    We didn't choose to add DVI because of the additional cost and complexity. We felt that customers would overall be well served with component and and vga. Of course, DVI is being considered for future products.

    -Patrick
    -Sr. Software Engineer, Roku.

  • "flat memory" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @03:27PM (#7611128) Homepage
    The comments on "flat memory" are significant.

    The real problem is that the UNIX/Linux world has never been able to get interprocess communication right. The problem is that what the application wants is a subroutine call, but what the OS usually gives you is an I/O operation.

    An example of good message passing is MsgSend/MsgReceive in QNX. Once you've set up a connection, you call MsgSend, which passes your message to the server waiting in a MsgReceive, and blocks the caller until the server does a MsgReply. This is all optimized so that if the server isn't busy when the call is made, control transfers to the server immediately, the server processes the request, and control transfers back. The most common case is very low overhead. Yet the same operations work over a network if needed.

    The wrong way to do it is to marshall up all the data and pump it through a socket, just to talk to another process on the same machine. This generates far more transactions at the OS level, and the overhead is much higher. Because the OS doesn't know you're doing a subroutine-call like operation, there are several extra unnecessary context switches. Worse, systems like CORBA do conversions to network-neutral formats, with even more overhead.

    There was an attempt to fix this in Mach, but it was not very successful, and Mach messaging never became mainstream. Windows has COM/DCOM/etc, which is clunky, but good enough to make Office work.

    • Pretty true, but you are neglecting the need to have calls that *don't* return anything, something which file-type i/o does do very well. Mach and COM and Corba complicate things unneccessarily, requiring either shared memory or complex interpretation of the messages in order to get the data moved. I've wondered why things cannot be done much simpler, combining the best features of file i/o (very predictable arguments), with the syncronous nature of most message passing.

      Here is my idea for a system interfa
  • This thing may be exactly what I've been looking for. It's basically a video card in a set-top box. It would seem to elegantly solve my problems of:

    - Waiting for a Linux-compatible video card with component video out
    - Deciding whether to keep my Shuttle XPC in the office (long video run) or in the office (remote control problem).

    One question I'll have for them: I have already have a picture-frame server that uses a standard browser as the client, and I don't think this thing is going to run a mode

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