Re: Why not more enthused about Roku? (other devices)

At 29/12/2004 02:15 PM, you wrote:
Roku [...] was merely a clone of the Squeezebox.


   The reason these devices weren't
>that interesting to me was that they required dedicated server software
>to be running on a PC somewhere.

I used to accept this as a sensible argument too. But the more I think
about it, the less sense it makes.

Turtle Beach had a very good idea when they said that you don't want to
build your hard disk into your MP3 player, for 3 reasons:
Size
Sharing of one song library amongst several MP3 players
Hard disks are growing so fast these days, you want to be able to upgrade
the hard disk "farm" without throwing away the MP3 players.

Turtle beach also has dedicated song server software running on a PC.

It's just running on the same (embedded, slow) PC that's doing MP3
decoding, driving and listening to the front panel hardware and running a
web server.

The same logic that applied to the hard disk applies here too.
The "song database server" :
you need a fast one
you want to be able to upgrade it as technology gets cheaper and/or faster
you need to be able to scale it to the size of the song database
You want to share it amongst multiple units (for caching, etc, purposes)

Too bad they didn't do that.

>The benefit is that I can now listen to music anywhere in the house
>without having to first go down to my office and fire up the PC (or
>leave it on 24x7 which is unacceptable to me).

But you leave the linkstation on? Why is that better?

I leave all my PCs on 24/7. It's better for them.

Michael

http://home.cogeco.ca/~michaelwagner/personal-page.htm
"All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die" Sheryl Crow