JJZolx;188535 Wrote: > The "only" disadvantage to this approach is that it's one that is not > going to fly in the consumer world. I don't care how you rationalize > it: It's a dead end. You can't rely on the computing power of an > arbitrary server, what that server might be doing, what it might be > running, how f****ed up it might be in terms of ant-viruses and spyware > and every other thing under the sun. No company in its right mind would > put itself in the position to deal with all the support headaches that > scenario entails. SlimServer and Squeezebox has done well so far due > to the geek appeal and the reliance on the knowledge of its user base. > That's about to end.I really like the current approach where most logic is in > SlimServer, the main reason is that it make the SqueezeBox behaviour very customizable. With all the logic in the SqueezeBox we would probably have a solution with closed source software and none or very few plugins.
However, I also think you have a point. We have seen plenty of support issues in the forum since the 6.5 release, but as you indicate I also suspect that the number of issues are going to raise a lot when SqueezeBox enters the massmarket. One solution would be to also sell a SlimServer hardware solution with pre-installed working SlimServer. This would get rid of most of the support issues, but the problem is that the total price of SqueezeBox + SlimServer box would be at least the double of todays price. At that price other companies solutions will start to look very interesting for most people compared to SqueezeBox. Especially since the massmarket really doesn't care much about sound quality, it just has to be "good enough" and this is something that most streaming devices today fulfills. Another solution would be to change the whole concept of the hardware to go from a slim device to a fat device. The problem here is that this would probably mean that most of the SlimServer software needs to be rewritten, which would result in huge development costs. Another issue with this is that it would mean that SqueezeBox wouldn't have much key features that distinguish it from other similar devices. The only key feature I see that really would remain is the display. So I think the easy way out is to improve the installation program so it detects possible problems. It might also be good to have some additional verification software that can be executed to verify the environment SlimServer is running in. These efforts should be focused on the Windows environment, because thats the environment the massmarket is going to use. Support issues for people running SlimServer on NAS boxes, Linux or MAC will probably be possible to handle in the same way as today. -- erland Erland Isaksson 'My homepage' (http://erland.homeip.net) 'My download page' (http://erland.homeip.net/download) (Developer of 'TrackStat, SQLPlayList, DynamicPlayList, Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Custom Skip, Multi Library and RandomPlayList plugins' (http://wiki.erland.homeip.net/index.php/Category:SlimServer)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33695 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
