Thursday, Aug 23rd 2007 by Ewdison Then
Worth Reading?
+4 [4 votes]
DivX unveiled a media streaming system today and SlashGear was invited to witness the new open hardware platform behind the set top box. As many reference designs are, the physical box itself is pretty plain with silver chassis that looks more like a wireless router.
The set top box features many connection ports such as component, HDMI, composite and Ethernet. The box also has a built-in WiFi to accommodate Wireless streaming of media.
DivX set top box does not decodes media files; decoding process is done in user’s computer. The box’s function is only to stream the media to your output source.
Unboxing video coming soon - YouTube is updating.
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I’m lucky enough to be part of the beta, and from what I understand, the client still does indeed do media decoding… there’s a chip/firmware for this reason, but the server breaks up the audio/video channels and sends them over (via wifi or ethernet) for decoding. What the thin box does not do is render the UI, which is where a lot of the heavy lifting is left to the PC (along with media management). I also have an AppleTV and modded xbox with XBMC, and the shortest path to getting stuff from my PC to TV so far has been this Connected beta, since the appleTV requires re-encoding to MP4 and the XBMC either can’t handle my more recent HD content. BTW, Connected seems to be playing all my Xvid files fine :-)