D-Link's New Boxee Box Runs Linux, Eyes Netflix 138
DeviceGuru writes "OpenBoxeeBox.com is reporting that D-Link's new DM-380 Boxee Box, demonstrated last night in New York at Boxee's Boxee Beta unveiling, runs Linux but does not yet stream Netflix video-on-demand titles. However, according to an unnamed Boxee insider, 'the goal is to have the device support Netflix.' The DM-380 features ports for HDMI, optical digital and analog audio, dual USB, and wired Ethernet, plus it has an SD card slot and built-in WiFi. Photos and screenshots are at OpenBoxeeBox, and additional details are on D-Link's website."
Uhh... So, Hi guys. My name is boxxy... (Score:3, Funny)
I aint trollin...
wifi, hdmi, usb... (Score:3, Funny)
What? No Lotus notes and a machine gun?
Re:wifi, hdmi, usb... (Score:5, Funny)
If it came with Lotus Notes the users would only need one bullet.
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You mean that you'd leave your loved ones to face it alone?
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You mean that you'd leave your loved ones to face it alone?
You mean your mom when she comes down to the basement?
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The bullet is for yourself.
It looks like crap (Score:4, Insightful)
This will never sell. It doesn't fit into the entertainment center paradigm. It looks like a puzzle box and a toy.
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I thought you were joking, then I went and looked at the pics. Here's hoping they make one that looks a bit more, uhhh, normal.
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Re:It looks like crap (Score:5, Insightful)
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What were you hoping to stack on top of a box that's about 5cm wide?
His iPod
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It's cute as a button!!! Uhhhh, gimme the standard entertainment system form factor so I can stack the damn thing on top of the DVD player please. I got nowhere to put that crazy cute thing.
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This will never sell. It doesn't fit into the entertainment center paradigm. It looks like a puzzle box and a toy.
I don't think it looks like crap, but it definitely doesn't look like it belongs in my A/V cabinet. Just make it look like a DVD player or something close and I think it would have a better chance of taking off. But, then again, the only people who will be buying this to begin with already know what Boxee is, which means this thing was never going to sell well anyways.
Re:It looks like crap (Score:5, Insightful)
the only people who will be buying this to begin with already know what Boxee is
You may turn out to be right if D-Link doesn't market this properly, but your underlying assumption is false. By way of example, most people who buy Nokia phones didn't already know what Symbian is. All people have to know to buy it is that it can stream "CNN, Hulu, CBS, YouTube, MLB.TV, Netflix (coming soon), Comedy Central, and more!"
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and more
It's given that the killer feature is porn, right?
This IS D-Link we're talking about. (Score:3, Insightful)
Marketing? Yeah right. The REAL issue will be SUPPORT. Having had to deal with D-Link support (both consumer and professional), I'd much rather be slowly eviscerated with a knitting needle.
And if it's something that can't be reduced to a cookie-cutter firmware setting with no options available, D-Link will fuck it up.
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It looks "interesting", but also useless. I can't stack anything on top of it, like my remotes, or game controllers, or a stack of DVDs. I'm unlikely to buy one so strange shaped.
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Brilliant idea! Especially for a device that doesn't have any internal storage!
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No machine with a significant amount of storage is going to satisfy that criteria.
That's why there are all of these quiet little diskless (or nearly so) machines with good video acceleration.
Media files take up a lot of space.
The 5TB thumbdrive just isn't here yet.
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Or you could buy any of the dozens of sub-200 dollar boxes that are designed to accept a new OS.
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If price is below 200$ as they say and it already runs linux, then perhaps hack it and use use it as a home "server"
And then create a beowolf cluster of these!
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You are being too kind, merely using "crap" to describe it. Start with "fugly" and go from there. It needs a copious beating with an Apple beauty stick.
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FTFY
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Re:It looks like crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It looks like crap (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't fit into the entertainment center paradigm.
FFS, it doesn't fit into an entertainment center, period. [dlink.com] Nor can anything be stacked on top of it. Plus it's needlessly hard to manufacture, find components for, and assemble. This is quite possibly the most horribly designed piece of consumer gear I've ever seen in my life.
ATTENTION LOSERS WHO WANT TO COPY APPLE: Design doesn't just mean making it look neat. Apple's stuff looks flashy but it actually works. (Most of the time, anyway.) [google.com] And if your design only looks "neat" to 14-year-old males, you should throw it right the fuck away and never venture down that path again. Seriously, this thing looks like a prop from a bad SciFi (excuse me, SyFy) movie-of-the-week, or maybe a Roomba from Eureka [wikipedia.org] that gains sentience and starts causing problems.
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No kidding - it didn't take but 1 quick glance at this thing to determine "Nope, I'm not buying that.".
Then again we may see "corner addons" appear on Ebay to make the thing into an actual box shape . . .
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I don't think it's ugl, but it ain't
I see lots of reboxing mods.
My TV is on the wall
I have a set top box, DVD player and a TiVo stacked.
It can replace my TiVo for playback, but I probably still want to stack it.....
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This will never sell. It doesn't fit into the entertainment center paradigm. It looks like a puzzle box and a toy.
I hit the page for comments, and the first 5 amount to "It'll never work, get off my lawn". I'm reminded that when Apple came out with their first iPod, comments here on slashdork were loaded with downer reviews. Here's a couple of them
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
This, btw, was in the article summary. A little further down:
Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
Or, next comment down:
Since when is Apple concerned about market share? They do what capitalism was born to do. Cater to a small market, and do it the right way.
Sure, not everyone was downer, but being pissy because you can't stick a remote
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It's not exactly what you're asking for, but there are plenty of (google "mac mini external hard drive") hard drives that are basically the same size as the mini.
Form over functionality (Score:1, Informative)
Too bad that thing is formed to take as much as space as possible, there is no way I get a permission from the mrs. to purchase one.
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Rest assured the Boxee Box will fit into your entertainment center. If the look doesn’t quite fit with your decor, not to worry. The RF remote means you can place the box out of sight and still control it. Of course, the Boxee Box prefers being on top : )
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1. you're on /. , you obviously haven't gotten close enough to a girl to ask one out, let alone marry one
Yawn. That wasn't even funny five years ago. However...
2. if we assume, for the moment, that the first part of your premise is in fact factual, way to wear the pants in the family, letting the mrs encroach on your domain, wussemeyer...
I wouldn't take relationship advice from someone who claims to have never been close to a girl.
And to be on topic, the design of this unit makes me want to avoid it out of spite for the idiot who thought that looking crazy was a good idea. This is why you should never draw your designs on a folded up napkin.
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...obviously designed by someone not familiar with the "ask forgiveness rather than permission" principle.
A box that can "fit in" with the rest of your AV gear could be sitting in your room chugging along for weeks before anyone notices it. This is actually what you want out of AV gear. It is not supposed to be an eyesore that sticks it's tongue out at you as you walk by it.
If you are able to put an eyesore in your living room then this sort of box has sea of extra competition to deal with.
HD Limitations? (Score:1)
Re:HD Limitations? (Score:4, Insightful)
...anything interesting hardware-wise most certainly has binary proprietary drivers with no interfaces available for hackers or non-corporate programmers.
OTOH, you can just get yourself an ION nettop and it won't look like some sort of an attempt at modern art.
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Does anybody know about HD support, I know it has it but curious if it's limited to only 720p like the AppleTV or if it will display 1080i/p.
And is there anything to stop me from installing XBMC on there. (I doubt there is but I'm not a big fan of boxee)
I was looking for a high definition media player and ended up purchasing a Popcornhour Model C200 networked media player after ruling out Apple TV. http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/ [popcornhour.com]
The C200 accommodates 1 or 2 internal hard drives and has a 3.5" bay for a Blue Ray or DVD player as well. 1080P playback is not a problem. There are very few file formats that won't work with this player.
Here are the C200 technical specifications: http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/index.php?pluginoption=productspec [popcornhour.com]
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The Popcord box doesn't support Hulu, which seems to be the way the networks are working to now a days.
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A Flash player is presently under development for the C-200.
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You might want to clue is in regarding how a weak ass Celeron and an nv7100 is supposed to deal with HD content.
Sure, you might be able to coax it to handle MPEG2 broadcast streams OK at 1080i. However, anything encoded with a non-jurassic codec at a reasonable bitrate is going to choke the AppleTV good.
Your claims might go over better in a forum not hip deep in HTPC users and ATV hackers and such.
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If you put a lawnmower engine in a Ferarri, it's not going to go 180mph regardless of what the rest of the drivetrain is capable of.
Why not Tivo? (Score:1)
First thought. Gimmicky, not stackable and this is something that Tivo should have already done. Seems like a bunch of us had the same first impression too. Won't bode well.
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opengl to directx? (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally, Ronen notes that with the Beta release, Boxee's graphical engine has migrated from from OpenGL to DirectX, allowing it to take advantage of Direct X video acceleration.
So the "officially supported" OS X and Ubuntu versions will be running on OpenGL, but the Windows version gets full hardware acceleration by using DirectX?
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In what sense is OpenGL not "full hardware accelleration"? I'm legitimately curious, not snarking. Are we talking hardware video decoding?
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Yes, they re talking about DXVA support.
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The Ubuntu version (and I assume the OS X version) use OpenGL solely for the menus and overlays. VDPAU is used for decoding video on the GPU, and it works exceptionally well.
Up until now though, this meant Windows users were SOL when it came to hardware accelerated video decoding - I'm guessing DirectX gives them this functionality.
The amusing part though is that the original project (XMBC) used DirectX since it only ran on the original XBox, and the XBMC project ported to OpenGL to support other platforms
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The key here is "for Windows". There's plenty of hardware acceleration under OpenGL.
The reason behind the lack of OpenGL in windows is that Microsoft dropped it in Vista. When you discontinue a "competing active technology" you can easily guess the reason.
Under Linux HD video's play just fine, even under cheap onboard video chipsets.
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So basically, Linux is a mess of incompatible solutions, Apple is ignoring outside developers entirely for the moment, and only Microsoft has a single API.
And that line seems to describe so much more than just this situation... : p
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Ultimately, the only thing that matters is "what cards are supported" and "how much do I have to spend".
The "chaos" on Linux doesn't concern me if stuff works. The level of "elegance" on Windows or MacOS is irrelevant to me if things don't work.
with DTV/PVR? (Score:2)
Is there anything out there like this that also does DTV/PVR?
I don't want to have multiple computers to maintain sitting around my TV set.
Oh, yeah, and it has to run Linux.
Thanks.
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I don't want to have multiple computers to maintain sitting around my TV set.
Oh, yeah, and it has to run Linux.
Yes, it's called a Linux box running MythTV (or some other PVR software) and Boxee.
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Yes, it's called a Linux box running MythTV (or some other PVR software) and Boxee.
Yeah, I tried setting all that up. Got mythtv installed, got the database going, got the client going, got the programming service going, got the recording going, etc, etc. Then I tried to play a video that I recorded and... blank screen. I could play the video directly with mplayer, xine, kaffiene, etc. etc, but no go with Mythtv.
I'm sure I have the ability to diagnose and fix the problem, but I am at a time in my life where I now have significantly more cash than time. I am willing to blow the latter
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Have fun waiting...
Meanwhile, the rest of us will be using DIY franken-systems and spending the vast majority of our time simply using what you can't be bothered to spend a little time to build.
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I'm in the same position.. I tried XBMC / Plex / Boxee as "the one true frontend". But, had no end of problems getting MythTV working with it. I got tantalizing glimpses of it working well, but it never stayed working.
I also have been using a Mac Mini as an HTPC that can do most everything I need between Front Row / iTunes, Plex/Boxee, and MythTV Frontend. It works passably well. But, I ran into too many oddities with the Mac OS X version of MythFrontend (others claim it's rock solid for them, so Y
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Yes, for example TViX PVR M-6640N or DreamBox. I don't know where you live, those probably do not work in USA as they use DVB-S/C/T.
It would seem that WD TV Live Full HD might be better than the "advertised". YMMV.
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Why do you want this thing? Just get over it and build your own.
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Still no Blu-Ray? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's too bad. Otherwise this would have been a serious contender for my next media box.
It seems there's no "do-it-all" media center on the market. Games, Blu-Ray, XBMC. Pick any two. I'm waiting for someone to get XBMC going on a PS3. When that happens, I will have chosen my corner in this fight.
Blu-Ray: not ready yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't buy Blu-Ray until the DRM gets more fully defeated. When Blu-Ray becomes ready, there will be some BD library that developers will be able to use to read the discs, and people will be able to implement players without getting licenses that specify that the product is required to suck (which is why there currently aren't any good players), and then good players (all-in-one boxes, MythTV, etc) will finally appear on the market.
Until then, if you want high-definition movies, just let pirates deal with the hassles of Blu-Ray's flakiness, and you can download them with bittorrent. You'll end up with movies that just work, including with your own all-in-one box.
Save your money until Blu-Ray becomes a serious consumer-friendly product. Right now, it's a problem-plagued scam for suckers only.
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Don't buy blu-ray at all. It's a transition format. Just enough to showcase the higher resolution screens we were trying to push (to get the digital terrestrial broadcast rollout going), but the rough edges are very visible. For instance, high-contrast regions frequently show visible fringing, and low contrast regions show blockiness on the disks I've tried so far.
Go ahead and rent, but blu-ray isn't going to be long-term for a number of reasons. In terms of picture quality, it's not like VHS where ther
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No, just my own experience. I suppose it could just be that the people responsible for the tailoring the compression aren't being as thorough as they could be: it might take six times as long to properly look over the details, time they're just not given. Possibly they're using tiny monitors with bad eyes, or worse, monitors whose resolution is less than the target resolution in scaling mode.
I really don't have a good explanation for why something with six times the data capacity as DVD, and a target outp
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In my experience, it depends a lot on the material.
I've got a reasonably well-calibrated 52" Samsung 1080p LCD, which I sit about 9 feet from.
The biggest problem I've noticed with Blu-Ray is that some (mostly older) releases are badly transferred, as if someone simply took some 480p DVD video and scaled it up. The picture is too soft.
Usually, though, things look (and sound!) rather nice. And I consider myself quite a picky bastard when it comes to encoding errors.
Perhaps your display is just set up poorly
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Hah. Well there you go. Damn it's easy to get sucked into these things.
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I'm glad I wasn't the only one confused by that statement. My guess is that he means software players. I've never cared for PowerDVD or WinDVD, though in all fairness, I haven't used them in ages. The lack of variety does, in general, reduce the incentive to make your player really good.
There's no playback on Linux or Mac, whatsoever.
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Select some content that shows off the beautiful capabilities of the player in question, in whatever medium is most convenient for the player (e.g. a Blu-Ray disc). Hook up the player to a high resolution monitor without HDCP (e.g. use your SVGA or DVI input, or put some middle man on an HDMI cable), and play the aforementioned medium.
Under these circumstances, mplayer will display a hig
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If you could find a USB blu-ray drive, you should be able to just plug it right in there. The wikipedia page on it says something about it being licensed for use in blu-ray players, so that should work, in theory. Though XBMC (or Boxee, comparing it to this box; it's built off of XBMC) on a PS3 would kick this thing's ass, easily.
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This box runs Linux. Plugging in the Bluray drive won't get you anywhere towards watching Bluray movies.
XMBC on PS3 : Non trivial (Score:2)
I'm waiting for someone to get XBMC going on a PS3.
But don't hold your breath. It's technically possible, but it's going to be a lot difficult.
You see the PS3 isn't closed to homebrew development. Quite the countrary. You can even install Linux on it and develop whatever you want.
But there's a restriction, when running homebrew software, the hypervisor doesn't give access to the GPU.
You can program all the scientific number-crunching application you want, you have full access to the CELL SPU units for some crazy parallel computing. But no 3D GFX only limite
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The PS3 used to be able to rip Bluray DVDs merely by using dd. I assume that Sony put a stop to that, however.
PS3 and AACS (Score:2)
I might have failed to express myself correctly :
I wasn't speaking about obtaining the files from a Blueray. That's also easy to do on PC.
I was speaking about the decryption of Bluerays' DRM (AACS encryption and BD+) with which the content of said files is encrypted.
As the PS3 plays Bluerays, it must have valid device keys into its firmware (or into some dedicated TPM-like chip).
(Just like, on PC, WinDVD and PowerDVD have similar keys).
Or do you mean that the way the PS3 is build, the Blueray drive can decr
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Sorry, my mistake then!
You're right, Sony would almost certainly not want to allow that.
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You do not want a consumer device with an optical drive built in, unless the drive is the device. It's always the first thing to fail. That's not a big deal on computers, where such drives are commodity OEM products, so replacing them is not an expensive send-it-back-to-the-factory process. But everybody I know who's bought a TV, VCR, or game console with a blu-ray built in has regretted it.
Since this box looks extremely hackable, you could probably add a blu-ray drive to it. Problem solved.
'm waiting for someone to get XBMC going on a PS3.
Why does it have
Netflix (Score:1, Troll)
Doesn't Netflix use SILVERLIGHT?
Let's see:
1). BoxeeBox uses Linux.
2). Linux doesn't run Silverlight.
3). You need Silverlight to run Netflix
Now fill in the missing word:
Therefore, BoxeeBox will never be able to run ____________.
The truth is that I've given up on standard Linux distros when it comes to multimedia. It simply isn't as good as Windows or Mac OS X. For about a year, we tried to run Mythbuntu, then Ubuntu w/ MythTV and Boxee. It simply never worked very well. Incompatibility issues with drivers an
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Doesn't Netflix use SILVERLIGHT?
Let's see:
1). BoxeeBox uses Linux. 2). Linux doesn't run Silverlight. 3). You need Silverlight to run Netflix
Now fill in the missing word:
Therefore, BoxeeBox will never be able to run ____________.
Roku runs Linux, and does Netflix. Now... Doesn't do much of anything else, but it does run Netflix.
The truth is that I've given up on standard Linux distros when it comes to multimedia. It simply isn't as good as Windows or Mac OS X. For about a year, we tried to run Mythbuntu, then Ubuntu w/ MythTV and Boxee. It simply never worked very well. Incompatibility issues with drivers and configuration problems drove us up the wall. When Windows 7 came out, we "upgraded" to Windows 7. (Why not?, it was originally a Windows Vista box).
I have Linux on several personal PCs, my media center, lots of systems at work, and some provate clients. Other than WiFi, I have no driver issues, and other than Netflix, no multimedia issues. While DVR functionality is lacking, if you are having multimedia problems, you are having problems, not Linux.
The problem I see with the Boxee Box is that it is competing against HDTVs that can connect with Netflix right out of the box. Plus, these HDTVs are better at displaying video than what Boxee will be able to do.
Boxxee can do 1080p. What TV do you have that can do better? The rest of your comment is dead on... As
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Flash is just bad on all operating systems, not just linux. It has the advantage of doing something on a lot of different machines, but it's a braindead least-common-denominator to do it. Flash video is just bog standard other kinds of video, but because it's encapsulated in flash, it has to be decoded in flash, which only uses the CPU. Why the heck should Hulu, which isn't even SD in resolution, require "2.0 ghz Core Duo" as a minimum when better-resolution video plays just fine on an iPod.
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moonlight is a linux implementation of silverlight. It has at least some support from microsoft.
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moonlight is a linux implementation of silverlight. It has at least some support from microsoft.
But it has none of the MS DRM, so it will not do any secure Silverlight stuff, like NetFlix.
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That could be part of the "eventual" aspect. It may be implemented in moonlight at some point.
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Tivos runs Linux. Tivos support Netflix. Therefore, BoxeeBox might just be able to run Netflix.
It's still ugly, though. Maybe someone will offer a 3rd party case for it.
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Re:Netflix on linux (Score:2)
You've got it the wrong way around - once D-Link contrives a Linux solution for Netflix streaming, then we'll be able to stream Netflix to any Linux platform we like.
Yes, it's not possible now, but the Netflix streaming overlords might be more persuaded by a potential corporate partner than they are by the unwashed masses. I wish D-Link the best of luck in this effort!
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You've got it the wrong way around - once D-Link contrives a Linux solution for Netflix streaming, then we'll be able to stream Netflix to any Linux platform we like.
Yes, it's not possible now, but the Netflix streaming overlords might be more persuaded by a potential corporate partner than they are by the unwashed masses. I wish D-Link the best of luck in this effort!
Roku and Tivo both have Netflix on Linux. But it is not open source, so we still do not have it...
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The technology Netflix uses for streaming movies on your computer (and by that, I mean "your x86 box that runs Mac OS or a modern version of Windows," unfortunately) is, in fact, Silverlight.
But Netflix is, and has been, pushing hard for more device adoption of streaming -- at this point, you can stream Netflix on Roku boxes, Samsung and LG players, some Sony TVs, PS3s, XBoxes, etc. It's not the case -- and you should not assume -- all these systems are using Silverlight to do aforementioned streaming.
Some
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My main multimedia machine runs Linux and is connected to a 47" TV via HDMI. I have no problem running any program and playing back any sort of multimedia. Now, I fix computers for a living and I know there are all levels of comfort when it comes to what people expect. My thoughts here are just that, that it is the end-user perspective on what you think should or should not work. We work pretty hard in the Linux community to satisfy people's demands and things get fixed pretty quick.
What we ask more tha
They called it OpenBoxeeBox... (Score:2)
Popcorn Hour (Score:3, Insightful)
Popcorn Hour still looks better
Looks stupid (Score:2)
Take a look at the pics of that device. No, really: RTFA. That is one of the dumbest designs for consumer electronics gear I've ever seen. I looks like someone took a cube and hacked off about half of it at a completely random angle, and then laid it awkwardly on its cut side. I don't care what kind of multimedia experience this thing offers, I would not buy this thing simply for its stupid looks.
I wouldn't be caught dead with this thing in my living room and that's saying a lot since my entertainment cente