Move Over BoxeeBox, Here Comes PopBox 117
DeviceGuru writes "Following closely on the heels of the December announcement of D-Link's BoxeeBox, Syabas Technology today said it will ship the PopBox, a $129 Internet-based A/V streaming set-top box (STB) in March. Both new gadgets have the potential to give Roku's popular STB a run for its money. All three boxes can deliver a range of Internet-based A/V streaming and social networking services to consumers' TVs. Like Roku's digital video player STB, the PopBox will include Netflix on-demand video streaming when it first ships. D-Link, meanwhile, is rumored to be scrambling to add Netflix streaming support to its BoxeeBox device as well, prior to inaugural shipments of that device. All three run embedded Linux OSes, and all are expected to sell for less than $200."
What's the point? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:could be cool (Score:5, Insightful)
avoid the c200 pch. I have one. its buggy as hell.
development has ceased (for all practical purposes) on the older models. they abandoned them ;(
the company does not have any US engineering and ALL firmware (and hardware, which also has bugs!) is designed overseas. its shows (sorry).
if you can afford to KEEP replacing the shitty PSU in the c200 (it blows on a large percent of owners) then fine. else, you may want to wait for some other box designed by a company with a higher clue factor (so far, none are that much better though, sigh).
c200 is just not worth its price. highly overpriced and you will be a beta tester for at least the next year and a half before it does all it claims it will.
(owner of 2 pch products. fwiw.)
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
I must be way ahead of the curve because I already have a device that can stream netflix, run boxee, xbmc, act as a media server, etc. It's called a computer. You can get one for very little money these days, even with hdmi output for use as a htpc. They do a lot of cool stuff!
Yeah I have one of those too. And setting up mythtv on it was frankly pretty trivial, I believe every person in the entire world whom ever had a problem with mythtv, all five of them, post their issues with religious fervor to each myth-related slashdot story. The only problem I had with my nice mythtv front ends, fanless small case, IR keyboard/mouse (program a universal learning remote control to act as the keyboard), and a fancy enough combination of graphics card and scan converter, cost something like $800 total several years ago. I "bought in" at that point because the price for a FE had finally dropped below one grand.
I guess the the things in the article run about $130. If only I could use them as mythtv frontends...
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason, that gets glossed over so often here, that netflix uses DRM on it's streaming is that the content owners are quite reasonably concerned about people saving it to their hard disk
No, they're quite unreasonably concerned about people saving it to their disk. Why unreasonable? Because this is a side business for Netflix currently and their main business is renting DVDs. I can copy rented DVDs to my hard disk and recompress them at leisure. Somehow, the fact that I can do this hasn't killed the rental market.
Now, possibly, I could rent every film I will ever want to watch, rip them all, and then cancel my subscription, but that isn't likely as long as more new films keep being made.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:1, Insightful)
That probably won't be the case for more than a few more years, though. Netflix would love to make streaming the main course and relegate comparatively costly DVD mailing to side-dish status, and probably intends to do so for their long-term strategy.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is irrelevant to my point. They are making the majority of their money by lending people films in a form that is trivial to copy. OS X even comes with a utility for doing it! Just click on the Make Image button in Disk Utility and it will copy the disk. Double click on the image and DVD Player will play it.
There's no reason to think that copying would kill their service if they suddenly switched from lending movies in one easily copiable form to lending movies in another easily copiable format, just because the second one involves the Internet. It would make it more useful though; you could download a TV show or a film and copy it to a mobile device to watch on a trip if they didn't have the DRM.