2Wire MediaPoint media player

[iBog]

2Wire and Blockbuster have announced a great looking set top box. Looks similar to the Apple TV form factor.

http://www.2wire.com/imgs/presskit/photos/mpt_QtrRt_front.jpg

2Wire's website claim local playback of media and support for UPnP AV and DLNA. There's also a USB port and media card reader.

AND... it's only $99 (including 25 movie rentals).

No idea on the CPU an other specs, but it's an interesting device (especially if it would play local H.264 or DivX files.

[Gamester17]

it's MIPS based, see: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2260476179.html

so read: http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=678

Even if you could figure out hacking and re-flashing the Popcorn Hour firmware you would first have to port Boxee/XBMC renderer to DirectFB and cross-compile it for ARM processor architecture, read more about that here => http://xbmc.org/forum/tags.php?tag=arm

So it would not just be a weekend project, ...even for a very skilled C++ programmer with previous embedded hardware platform experience :pThe same applies, just replace ARM processor architecture with MIPS processor architecture.

:rolleyes:

[Ebbo83]

How great is this?!?

I've just read the same announcement and registered here to post it... so you have been a lot fast =)

[iBog]

I understand the device is MIPS based with embedded Linux.

Yes, it would be nice to run Boxee on this platform but that wasn't the intent of my article. Just an off-topic discussion of other media players.

It also got me to wondering if there were any inherent benefits of a MIPS platform. Is it cheaper? Handle multimedia functions better? Lower power consumption? Cooler?

Check out the user guide here (http://www.blockbuster.com/content/v.4.230.3.0/media/settopbox/2wire_STB_user_guide.pdf). It includes some screen shots.

[Gamester17]

It also got me to wondering if there were any inherent benefits of a MIPS platform. Is it cheaper? Handle multimedia functions better? Lower power consumption? Cooler?Yes, both ARM and MIPS SoC (System on Chip) chips have all those benefits:
- Cheaper hardware for mass-production.
- Built-in hardware video/audio codecs (all legal with licenses paid by the chip manufacturer)
- Much lower power consumption and therefore runs much cooler (and quiet/fanless).

But many of those ARM and MIPS SoC chips also have some limitations which the x86 does not have, like:
- Non-standardized graphics (meaning no OpenGL support, which Boxee uses on all other platforms)
- Limited processing power for general processing (while an x86 CPU is almost all general processing power).

If Boxee would ever go for a ARM or MIPS processor then they would propably first look at one that support OpenGL (as the Boxee GUI needs proper hardware acceleration), because believe it or not but that GUI is much more advanced than it may seem.

Intel, AMD and VIA Technologies (the three big x86 manufactures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_architecture)) are all aware of these benefits of ARM and MIPS chips in the SoC (System on Chip) embedded market and the potential profit they could make if they could get a piece of that SoC (System on Chip) embedded market, that is why they are currently putting a lot of money and development into new x86 processors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_architecture) that will compete head to head with those ARM and MIPS SoC (System on Chip) chips, and they are slowly but surly catching up in this area;

Intel now Atom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom) and Canmore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_codenames), AMD has Puma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Puma#Puma_platform) and Geode, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geode_(processor)) VIA has Nano (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Nano) and the C7 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_C7). Combine that with a OpenGL 2.0 capable 3D graphics chips and you have a very flexible system, but it might not still not be capable of 1080p playback of H.264 video unless that graphics chips as a bitstream processor that can assist with that decoding.

:cool:

[iBog]

As usual, thanks for the very detailed response.