Have to say, I agree that video is not the way to go. The idea of an 'all-in-one' box is nice. But to succeed in the mass market - against the likes of Apple, Sony, etc - the product has to 'just work'.
I think the consensus on this forum is that even the Squeezebox - a mature product trying to solve a much simpler task (ie audio, not video) - still isn't pick-up-and-use to the average Joe. Surely that should be accomplished before even thinking about adding video support too? Doing video is going to add a whole new world of difficulty - network-related problems will be much worse, storage requirements higher, then there's codec issues, video formats, image formats (presumably need to view photos etc too), different connector types, output formats, regional standards etc - and that's just the underlying 'physical' stuff. For the actual data sources, in order to 'just work', this box has got to be able to rip DVDs, rip Blu-Rays, stream from websites, download from USB/memory cards/phones, support 'netcasting' TV (eg BBC iPlayer et al), upscale, downscale, cope with DRM, and transparently hook up to a local network and the internet. That's before you even start considering if/how it should also support recording video, receiving 'normal' TV, etc. I imagine it would difficult to get agreement on what, exactly, such a device should do, let alone actually develop it. Oh, and your product space is also going to be attacked by increasingly clever games consoles, Blu-ray players, integrated TVs, phones/laptops with HDMI or even wireless streaming, and who knows what next. Much too much, IMHO. -- oktup ------------------------------------------------------------------------ oktup's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1117 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=72512 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
