I would put forth in the current environment there will never be anything equivalent in the video world due to the differences in digital video, opposite digital audio.
Companies like Apple and Slim/Logitech piggy backed on the success of the whole digital audio ecosystem, which grew out of an environment that no longer exists. The biggest problem I see is the lack of anything remotely similar to the ubiquity of MP3, and now that the content producers are intent on DRM, it will be a long time (maybe never) that you can buy movies in a decent format like Divx/Xvid or H.264/mkv. Instead they will shoehorn you into some proprietary junk, that will likely only play with extensive trans coding or some constant checking with their server. So we're stuck with the tower of babel, both incoming (file format) and outgoing (HDMI 1.3 and beyond). I think the issue comes down to where you're getting your video and how you want to play it, and what your server is. If you want to play anything you need a beefy CPU on either end (client or server), from what I've seen the best on the client would be some sort of hacked PC (xbmc, hacked appletv) but you're talking a great amount of prep time with the chance of bricking the device. On the back end there are a number of servers each with their own set of drawbacks, generally ranging from freedom/anonymity on one end to the ability to play protected media/corporate tracking on the other. More common are UPnP devices which have custom chip sets (usually Sigma Designs) which can trans code on the server end if you run their PC software. I have the buffalo LinkTheater DVD player, and for what I use it for, streaming Divx/xvid/Mpeg 2/4 it works pretty well, but most other things it sucks. What I like is I can stream from my NAS and all the video is done on the device which means I don't need a real server. But without transcoding it will never play my Sony SD 550 movies or any newer codecs, which I can live with for now. My feeling is Asian companies will take the lead on this as they're less worried about DRM, and don't have to deal with media companies coming after them, like American companies do. Most of the units mentioned in this thread are Asian units rebranded for a small US distribution company. So there won't be a quirky Slim type start-ups coming down the pike more like TVIX (check out the TVIX forums to see what I'm talking about http://forum.tvixbox.com/ ). The best forum/information source I've found on this is the AVS Forum http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=39 Good luck! -- sander ------------------------------------------------------------------------ sander's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10737 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=40689 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
