This one time, at band camp, Michael (Micksa) Slade wrote: >Anyone have any experience with the Zensonic Z500? how >hackable/reliable/flexible is it?
I bought one because the brochure was glossy and it has words like "ogg" and reviews like "works great". It reboots itself during the poweron phase, has a tanty when playing off of a SMB share, has a REAL tanty when playing off of a USB disk, randomly turns on subtitles when watching DVDs, loses audio channels when playing DVDs, has a terrible interface for browsing for music or video. Their "bug reporting" service is a web forum which inevitably gets drowned with the noise that so often accompanies a web forum: vague speculation, no factual information, "works for me"s, and threads that go off on tangents and never solve the original poster's problem. There is no other way to communicate with the developers for a support issue. The menu is really polished though! It runs embedded Linux on a StrongARM, but I suspect all the decoding is done in hardware on an MPEG decoder and one of those FPGA dudes programmed to do the OGG decoding. The upshot is that the firmware upgrades can only improve the interface, but not the codec support, I think. (Which I find remarkable that given my laptop has workable USB and SMB client support, and it too runs Linux, why does the Z500 have problems?) The source is available on their website once you join their club (i.e. punch in your serial number) and I have been meaning to have a tinker inside it, but sorely lacking spare time ;-) >Any recommendations for alternatives? Build your own PVR from mythtv, it might end up being a little more expensive but you get all the features you want and you know how to fix it. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
