jr conlin's ink stained banana

It's been a while since i posted anything about the media hub stuff, so i figured i should at least provide an update.

The Roku Photobridge is still pretty good. It's suitable for doing what i needed it to do (show pictures on the TV and play MP3s) but it's severely lacking in a great many other departments. In some respects, i'm not surprised. It's simply that i've come to the same conclusion i reached a while ago.

In a nutshell, to do what i want, i need Windows XP in my living room.

Why XP?
In the future, all media will have DRM. Most already does. If i want to play my Y!Launch station, i need something that can handle WMA9 DRM. If i wanted to stream any iTunes i'd purchased, i'd need Apple's DRM.

This isn't a question of Linux "catching up". Microsoft and Apple will not produce a binary install for every variant form of Linux and window manager out there. There's no common platform. It's not going to happen.

Macs are great for Apple stuff, but again, you're not going to get WMA10 or beyond on it. There is a chance that Microsoft could bundle a OS* version of their players, (since Apple at least has a common platform), but since it's a niche market, it's not going to be a top priority.

Finally, Win2K is dead. XP is the current baseline. i'm not happy about that, but it's out of my control. Fortunately, XP doesn't have all of the onerous limiting factors that Vista will have, so it's a fair baseline to work with. CE is not really an option either since it's heavily customized and cumbersome to work with.

So, starting off, your initial base cost of a living room media player is $80.

Hardware:
The good news here is that you can skimp. You need a local hard drive, 512MB of memory (1GB preferred), USB 2.0 and video out. The CPU doesn't have to be much more than 800MHz for heavy video processing, and far less for most applications. Most Mini-ITX systems will fit the bill for this, provided you get one silent and cool enough to put in the living room. Not really an easy task, but possible. i'd also recommend a bluetooth keyboard and mouse even though it potentially means more crap in the living room. Fortunately you'll probably just need the mouse.

Here's also where the USB ports really come into play. There are a number of devices coming to market which provide media services and plug into USB connections. This should free up that sole ISA slot for a nice, high-end video card for whatever HDTV you want to drive from it.

Network:
Again, i still strongly recommend getting an external network adapter that plugs into a 100bT card. This will allow you to upgrade outside of the core equipment. g may be cheap and fast now, but n is just around the corner, and who knows? You may just run that cable/fiber yet. This is also why you want a reasonably beefy CPU and local storage so that you can stream and pre-buffer content before playing. Suddenly keeping your DVD movies on a central server seems plausable, no?

Finally, getting a dedicated device is moderately attractive, up until you hit the point where you want to do something else with it. It will happen. Solve the problem by putting a PC in there and it becomes less of an issue.

i figure the cost will be around $500, with a little creative shopping and Moore's Law.

So, there's the game plan. Now all i need to do is build it and sneak it into the living room before Anne Marie figures it out. Kinda sucks that i can't get a simpler (cheaper) dedicated device, but for what i want, i just can't seem to find one.

i did find one thing, though. Remember how i was looking for a fairly good alarm clock? i found it, and yes, it costs $300. No, i'm not getting it.