Re: roku photobridge

Er... what? The DVD player I was talking about can decode the following
*audio* formats:

-- Red book CD (raw WAV in effect)
-- MP3 CBR and VBR up to 320 kbps
-- Dolby Digital 5.1 compressed audio
-- DTS compressed audio

All of these are codecs. And of course, so are the examples you cite
(ogg etc). My point was that it's NOT expensive to put codecs in a
front-end these days -- doing so in a back-end "server" is not really
necessary, nor does it scale very well. MIPS are cheap, and the server
argument (share expensive resources) no longer applies to them. What you
*are* left with, on a server, is (a) the advantage of a single, central,
repository for media and (b) the cost reductions when storing very large
amounts of digital content.

When looked at this way, the server stays dumb and the "smarts" are in
the devices.

--Tim


Andrew J wrote:

>> Actually the whole server-side stuff is indeed an issue, with the
>> growing importance of NAS devices. Sure, some of these are "hack-able"
>> by those in the know, but in general adding services to these is
>> difficult. Of course, one can use a PC as an intermediary to the NAS,
>> but that's a pretty ornate setup just to play music.
>
>
> NAS's are dumb devices that don't do anything other than serve files.
> Yes most are hackable as they run linux, but once again they don't have
> the grunt there like the AT to much more than they were frist built for!
>
>> ...and it doesn't cater to manyother needs. I actually have a dedicated
>> server, running Windows Server 2003. While this is not very typical, at
>> present very few of the server-side services run on this OS. So I'm
>> stuck with the audiotron.
>
>
> ? slimserver does!
>
>> I also don't buy the "codecs are expensive" argument. Last time I
>> looked, there were a whole bunch of codecs in my $95 DVD player (DVD
>> video, DVD Audio, CD, SACD, Dolby Digital, DTS etc etc.).
>
>
> See your not really talking a codec's here.. You talking about a DVD
> playback, and on DVD playback is DVD video (MPEG2), DVD audio, which is
> Dolby digital or DTS and your talking CD, which is just music, and SACD.
> These are all DVD related things topics and the player SHOULD do them.
>
> I'm talking, OGG, flac, mp3, WMA, AC3, itunes etc god know what else is
> going out.
>
> Your chip can't play *ANY* of them!
>
> Andrew
>
>