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Nokia Media Terminal 78

Posted by Hemos from the pretty-GOOD dept.
A reader writes: "Nokia has announced an media terminal at IBC'2000 (International Broadcasting Convention, Amsterdam) which seems to be a serious competitor for the home. It includes DVB receiver, x86 PC hardware running Linux & XFree. The hardware supports also recording the TV stream to the hard disk (TiVo functionality) and other cool stuff."
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Nokia Media Terminal More

Nokia Media Terminal

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  • Wow... (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    That looks like a handy little device, there...

    WebTV on Linux, anyone?

    Now, where does it say how much it costs? This might make a good, cheap X-terminal as well...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • What is a DVB?
  • I hope it is as good quality as their celphones! ?

  • Yeah, but... (Score:4)

    by BrK ( 39585 ) on Friday September 08, 2000 @07:36AM (#794253) Homepage
    This thing definately looks cool, and I'm sure I'll have at least one in my house...

    However, it seems that homes really need to be networked first to make things like this _really_ usefull. This would be great as a kitchen station, or bedroom station to supplement a main PC, but very few homes have the infrastructure to support this kind of thing.

    Wireless sucks, especially considering the price. Until we can get 25Mbps wireless LANS for less than $40/node (with decent anti-snooping measures) wireless is just another toy.

  • Re:What's a DVB (Score:4)

    by TheReverand ( 95620 ) on Friday September 08, 2000 @07:36AM (#794254) Homepage
    Digital Video Broadcast

    Here is more info [dvb.org]

    rev

  • Looks more like an old or slow PC to me. Celeron? Hard drive? graphics accelerator? Linux? Wouldn't surprise me if someone uppgraded that proc and started using it to play UT on their TV. Yeah, teh graphics card prolly sucks, but for 6x4x16, in UT which is morelimited by the proc, it would work. Or even load Windows, for a wider selection of games. This does NOT look like a completely closed box. Why not just market it as a computer for use with a TV? It has pretty much all the requirements. One thing htat puzzled me, though, was the lack of pricing data anywhere on the page.

    -----------------------

  • but what else am I supposed to say about it?

    Oh yeah...how about a beowulf cluster of these things...

  • Here comes the flood of TiVo devices, seems like everyone is going to build this functionality into their device for a while.
  • Digital Video Broadcasting, a European standard for broadcast of digital video. Uses MPEG-2 as the encoding standard. DVB exists in three (at the moment) flavors: DVD-S Satellite DVD-T Terrestrial DVD-C Cable For more info http://www.dvb.org/
  • Anybody know when these things will be actually available?


    ...phil

  • Press release (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Press release is here [pressi.com].
  • How exactly would Nokia be hurt by competitors putting prices up? They would just walk off with the market... More likely is that there would be a price war and a few companies retire hurt, with the remaining ones putting up prices - however, price wars can't go on too long, and are hardly a reason to wish for less competition...

    Convergence is happening, whether you like it or now - in other words, market boundaries are becoming much less distinct as companies find there's technology and maybe even demand for a box that can play games, show digital TV, surf the Net, etc.

  • The Swiss army knife approach (Score:3)

    by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Friday September 08, 2000 @07:47AM (#794262)
    This thing looks like an attempt to combine the functions of Tivo, WebTV, DirecTV, Diamond Rio, and Playstation. I love my Swiss Army knife, but each of its many tools are poor substitutes for those made specifically for a given purpose; I'm guessing that the Nokia Media Terminal is probably the same. While it might be better than nothing at all and provide some basic level of these sort of services, I suspect that people wanting serious functionality in one or more of these areas will become dissatisfied pretty fast.

  • First apple bring out the G4 cube (Score:3)

    by bob_jordan ( 39836 ) on Friday September 08, 2000 @07:49AM (#794263)
    and manage to make it look like a very high tech toaster. Now nokia release a set-top breadbin. What next the Microsoft X-Box Waffle Iron?

    What is it with these design types and bandwagons?

    Bob.

  • Re:Anybody know when... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "It will be available in the market in the 2nd quarter 2001", according to this press release [nokia.com] on the Nokia site. No price is given.

    What a sweet looking device. Long live Nokia!
  • Does anyone know if it is feasable to record raw video data to a hard disk without having to tune it in.

    For example:

    watch one channel, record another (tuned), like with current TV + VCR systems, but then take a dump... data dump that is of another channel. Yes, I know, you are saying "well if you are specifing a channel, then you are tunning it in". I really don't know much about this, just wondering.

    Now if they made a PC card that tuned in up to, say 10 channels at once, and then could store these other channels as big blocks of MPEG-2 (at least from what I remember of DVB), then you could watch them later. I just don't know what the max number of tuners on one card is... or what the output (for saving not current viewing) is.

    guess I gotta do some research now!

    damn you /.

    got me all interested in something now

  • If this really is to take off for the average guy, it might be worthwhile to add a DVD player to the mix (you would just need a pc DVD drive and possibly a hardware decoder). With that, you could get away without a VCR. You can tape broadcast and rent movies. Without DVD capability, you still need a separate VCR or DVD to watch rentals.

    -------------
  • I agree wireless networking sucks today, but very soon it will be much better. Bluetooth enabled communications devices will be able to link devices within the home at distances of up to 100 feet.

    Basically, in the near future, it would make sense for each home to have one wireline node to connect to the infrastructure and Bluetooth nodes within to interconnect locally. This goes for cell/wireless phones as well. Local wireless connectivity is definately the wave of the future.

  • Good question. I love my Tivo, but I often find myself wishing it could record two channels at once. (I'm not worried about viewing one and recording another. Since I got the Tivo, I almost never watch TV that isn't time-shifted.) There have even been occasions when I wanted three channels at once. But 10? That's some mighty serious tv-watching.

  • wiring a house with cat5 is not a big deal. my flatmate and myself wired our entire house in 3 hours. Our hub sits right on top of the TV/Stereo so we can watch the pretty flashing lights..
    maybe when I'm feeling energetic I'll photograph it and stick it up on my page with a Home networking how-to...
    ---
  • One of the main reasons not to market it as a computer is that you can get the broadcasters to subsidise the cost of a multimedia terminal, like they do in the UK. This thing is aimed at broadcasters, not individuals, and unlike individuals, broadcasters prefer to buy terminal equipment for their customers, not PCs.
  • Don't we have these now? I call mine a "computer".

    (And mine has better processor stats... :)

    Vulgrin the MAD

  • Nokia not the first in this field (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08, 2000 @08:10AM (#794273)
    Ericsson already announced a mobile media terminal based on Linux. It will be available around the end of the year. It will use Opera as browser, but will not be based on X but instead use Qt embedded. It will also include a phone and Bluetooth connectivity.
  • Is this the first one of these pseudo-computer devices with an optional 10/100 ethernet adapter? I sure do hope this is a trend. I'd like to see ethernet available on all of these devices.
  • There is no limit on the maximum numbers of tuners on a card, only size of 10 tuners(the metal thingy on your tv card) and ofcourse the cost of the card and chipset to support it.

    Most people wont use it so it will be pretty high priced.....

    Jeroen

  • I recently setup a bookpc [boldata.com] (NOT an endorsement - just a link [to the first google hit] for those who don't know what it is) to do just this kind of stuff. I came up empty trying to get XFree86 working on the TV (NTSC - something like 15.5 kHz horizontal Sync) output.

    Anybody have any sources on how they did this?

  • It looks like this might work with Dish Network (not affilicated) since they claim to support DVB and an open architecture.
  • Nice to see a device like this being touted without a single microsoft technology on the specsheet.
  • Bluetooth is slated to work up to 30 feet (can be increased later) without repeaters.

    As this bluetooth faq [bluetoothcentral.com] says:

    • Bluetooth is intended to replace wires in small, personal communication devices; and does not support many of the features that a full-fledged wireless LAN technology needs in order to be used for corporate local area networks.

    • Bluetooth's advantages are its very low power requirements and cost (target price is $5 per device). Technologies like IEEE 802.11 are the better choice for corporate LANs (and perhaps WAN connectivity with future improvements of the standards) while Bluetooth will be the better technology for connectivity between computers and small PDAs, digital cameras, cell phones and the like.

    Anyway, if you think today's wireless networks suck (with 10mbps at 300 feet), then I'd think that bluetooth would suck even more (700kbps at 30 - 100 feet).
    --

  • But who will sell the razor blades? (Score:5)

    by SonOfFlubber ( 14544 ) on Friday September 08, 2000 @08:25AM (#794280)
    I see a lot of comments comparing this to WebTV, and rightly so. Having worked there and now working at Nokia ( but it is a big company and it is the first time I have seen this 'appliance') I have to wonder how this is going to shake out.

    Nokia has been very successful in the cell phone market since they are providing the right piece of the puzzle - the sleek phone that everybody loves, and leaving all the messy customer relations to the mobile phone service providers. The question is whether that approach will work for the emerging television/web convergence market.

    The pioneer of this market, WebTV decided a long time ago that the money to be made is in the subscription to services, and not in selling the hardware itself. There is a subsidy given to the licensees of the WebTV hardware, so what you pay for a WebTV box is really not what it costs to make. The hope is that the subsidy will be made up in future subscription revenues. Fine if every body signs up for the WebTV service, but what frequently happens is that WebTV box you bought for Great Uncle Elmer's Christmas present is still sitting in the box since he is unsure how to hook up all of those cables. No hook-up, no subscription revenue stream.

    WebTV's approach is a lot like the razor manufacturer that gave away razors so that you would buy their replacement razor blades, the profit being in the selling of the blades. Nokia seems to think that they can profit from the selling of the shavers, and giving the profits from the replacement blades to someone else. Good luck.

    I do have to commend Nokia for embracing Open Standards though. WebTV was acquired by M$ and a lot of changes were imposed that did not work out.
    There are a lot of Linux and *nix friendly prople there; they were still using Linux for hardware bringup when I left there. When we were told that the client OS was going to be WinCE, the developers soon were in the habit of squinting and gritting their teeth while saying "wince" whenever they mentioned the OS's name. Nice thing about Open Systems is that if it doesn't do what you want it to do, you open up the source code and code it yourself. With a proprietary OS, even in the mother company, you submit your ECRs(Engineering Change Requests) and wait for it to work its way through the system and pray that it did not get too mangled after those dozen planning meetings before it finally gets assigned to someone to code.
  • A few days ago their was a story on Slashdot about a bug in nokia 9000 series phones where specific SMS messages could crash them. At that point several slashdot readers attacked nokia for, amongst other things, not taking Linux seriously (I didn't see how that related to a communicator crashing).

    Do these readers have the balls to say that they where wrong?
  • Another area they have expanded into is network security. Similar to what they are doing with this media broadcasting box, they have taken a computer running a scaled-down and hardened version of BSD, put it into a router-type box with various interfaces, and are selling it with Checkpoint Firewall-1. See here [nokia.com] for more info.

    I'm not sure if I mind Nokia's entrance into these fields. The common theme seems to be that they simply repackage normal computers, running unix, into appliance-type boxes. I'm curious to see what other applications they come up with.

  • woo! (Score:1)

    by kennedy ( 18142 )
    whoa this looks pretty damn cool :) too bad ther's no price info on the site... :(

  • Ugh (Score:1)

    by ptomblin ( 1378 )
    Check out the PDF brochure, especially the picture on the last page of the teeth gritting hags from hell! Look out little girl, or they'll bite your head off. That little knife isn't going to protect you.
    --

  • Yep, you heard it, this device uses Mozilla to render pages (or probably more likely just the gecko core functionality.)

    Makes you wonder why all these people have been saying Mozilla is dead, Mozilla sucks, Mozilla is bloated. A non-released product chosen over IE as an embedded browser is certainly not going to die very soon.

    Yep, this very page was posted with the 2000090604 nightly. And we are rapidly approaching M18 (perhaps even today.) Of course we'll get there sooner if you pop over onto irc.mozilla.org and join #mozillazine and start squashing bugs.

    --
    Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess

  • I think the bandwidth of a TV channel (at least in the US) is 6 MHz. Grabbing the entire TV spectrum would take a pretty beefy drive :-)

  • serious competitor? (Score:4)

    by rasterboy ( 871 ) on Friday September 08, 2000 @08:51AM (#794287) Homepage Journal


    Nokia has announced an media terminal at IBC'2000 (International Broadcasting Convention, Amsterdam) which seems to be a serious competitor for the home.

    I think I'll stick with my home. Even though this media terminal is a "serious competitor" for my home, my home stores a lot more stuff, and allows me to live inside of it.

  • We definitely need an icon for Nokia!
  • According to Nokia's press release:

    The Nokia Media Terminal will be available for consumers in the end of the 2nd quarter 2001.

    Since Mozilla is on M17 with M20 being the final milestone, it should be ready by then (at least one would think so.)
  • Who is, and/or would admit to being a NON-serious competitor?

    This is the TechMach 2200, a non-serious competitor to Nokia. I mean, we just put it together for a laugh, you know? I mean, sure, you could buy it, if you want one we'll try and find one lying around and send it to you.

    Be interesting to see in the Olympics a guy just shuffling down the 100metres. The winnning time is 9.82 seconds, he gets there in about 45 seconds... "well, I decided to compete, but not seriously, you know? I mean I'm here, I would have liked to get a medal, and all, but I mean, I could never burn down the track like that, I mean, I'd snap a hamstring and barf if I even tried..."

  • They don't have to distribute the source until they start distributing the binaries. AFAIK no one has one yet.

    "Free your mind and your ass will follow"

  • Dual License... (Score:5)

    by Christopher B. Brown ( 1267 ) <cbbrowne@gmail.com> on Friday September 08, 2000 @09:18AM (#794292) Homepage
    That "little license thingy" does not prevent Nokia from having a chat with Netscape Communications Corporation (or AOL) and making other arrangements.

    Note the following bit of the Netscape Public License:

    V.2. Other Products.

    Netscape may include Covered Code in products other than the Netscape's Branded Code which are released by Netscape during the two (2) years following the release date of the Original Code, without such additional products becoming subject to the terms of this License, and may license such additional products on different terms from those contained in this License.

    Note the phrase may license such additional products on different terms from those contained in this License.

    The result is that NCC, as original "owner" of the code base, has arranged that they may license the code to other people on other bases.

    Nokia could get the code under the MPL; that would indeed require that they contribute back changes in source code form. If they get the code under some other licensing arrangement, the MPL obviously doesn't apply to them.

  • true. i have a amdk62-450 with two hard drives (for swap file purposes) and a voodoo 3 3500 and a dvd drive. i can use my internet ready computer to display far superior graphics on a tv or tv on a monitor, and can play games, switch os/s, record tv, or any of about a hundred other options. If you really want to have all the features of a webtv or tivo unit with all the power of the internet, seriously consider using something like what i have. however, for my mom and dad, this will be fine.

    my question is, since i have gotten them use to linux, specifically using gnome, what's the primary UI for this thing? command prompt? surely not. kde? please no. Gnome? it'll hang more than you can surf the net. i know they said mozilla based browser, so does it use X?

    so many questions, so few answers that i saw.

    and where is the price? (to quote someone else)

    -moderators: at the time of posting, these are all original comments.
  • some specs...

    Intel Celeron(TM) 366 MHz CPU or faster
    20 GB Hard Disk or more
    Support for ISDN, PSTN, xDSL or Cable modem
    Accelerated 3D graphics and special effects
    Conditional Access and Parental Control
    Linux Operating System
    Mozilla browser - enhanced for PAL/NTSC screen displays
    HTML, HTTP, JavaScript, DVB and ATVEF compliant
    Support for GIF, JPEG, MIDI, PDF, MACROMEDIA, etc

    Don't know about you, but if it runs linux I don't think the "parental control" will be much of an impediment to some of us of the younger generation... ;-)

  • it's possible, although monetarily feasible i don't know. the thing is the tuning itself, or else as someone else said, just capture the whole incoming set of signals. the thing about the current system is that it is like getting a multi-page pdf file. if you have ever tried to use photoshop to open the pdf, it says, what page. it doesn't show all at once. same thing with the television. it has to know where to look.

    you could probably contact voodoo or ati, haupage, or a coupla others, but i don't think they normally produce such an item.

    now, two or three video inputs and a coax splitter would enable this easily, and you're only talking $35-40 per pci input card.

    just an idea

  • Right today I can get a 11Mbps wireless ethernet card from Dell for $139. If I get more than about 5 nodes, it will likely outperform a comperable 10baseT network. It includes 128-bit RC4 encryption at the media layer, to say nothing about what can be done at other layers. That is
    already very good for a lot of scenarios (like
    linking up my VCR to my TV).

  • Why x86? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why, oh why did it have to be x86? There are so many newer, cooler, faster, and just all-around BETTER processor designs available today? Why do they have to contribute to half of the wintel hegemony?

    It doesn't make sense, either. This should be a small, quiet, cool, low-power device. The only good reason for using an x86 is that everyone knows it already and its a primary platform for Linux.

    ...or maybe there's another reason...

    Running x86 leaves the door open to using a Microsoft platform in the future, doesn't it? Sure, Linux might be good for development, but we all know Microsoft has a stake in Nokia. There's no way they're going to let this product go for long with a Free OS.

    In fact, I smell a conspiracy here: Do a crappy job loading Linux. Watch it crash. Tell the world (or at least ZDNet) that Linux wasn't up to the task. Replace it with WinCE. Tell everyone it's "Windows-Powered" and watch it succeed.

    It makes sense -- yesterday's article on Unix buffer overflow vulnerabilities shows that Linux can be sabotaged in ways Windows can't.

    I hope that Linus and the kernel developers have seen this coming. They should suspend new features and start working on pre-emptive fixes right now. If they don't, I guarantee that Microsoft will win this particular battle and banish Linux from appliance-type devices much like VHS crushed the Amino format. You've never heard of Amino? I rest my case. In 10 years, nobody will remember Linux either.

    ..just my US $.02

    Don Kunch
    Senior Applications Specialist
    Tonedot Technology, Inc.
  • I am going to go broke fairly soon because of devices like this. One good thing is that I will not have to heat my house in the winter anymore, so I can save a little money.
  • They can't add a DVD Player, silly - its running linux... and the MPAA with the DMCA is making sure that it will never happen. What a brilliant thought, what a dismal reality...

  • This looks like a very cool product. Cooler still is the fact that Nokia based it around open source software. This certainly raises my already high opinion of Nokia as a company. I've always like their products. Now I just need to figure out how to get my hands on one of these...
  • I don't like it because it runs Linux. I think it's the first device that I've seen that can use some sort of cable modem. This sure beats a regular analog dial up modem. I still won't buy one until they support ethernet cards, though. I don't care if it's TIVO, Web TV, etc.

  • I love Nokia's phones, but they don't seem so good at Digital TV set top boxes.

    I unfortunately opted for a Nokia STB with my OnDigital subscription (UK terrestrial digital TV), purely on the basis of the quality of their phones. Since then I have had to reboot the machine every day or so, although some software updates seem to fix things for a while - until they add some new feature, and the whole thing becomes unstable.

    I would blame OnDigital, but I heard that the much-delayed Digital Teletext service worked for ages on Philips and other makes of decoder before some hacky software work-around for all the hardware bugs was hammered out for the Nokia boxes (although I have little firm evidence for this).

    I hate to think of the combination of this with the (in)famous stability of Mozilla.

  • Ok... (Score:1)

    by shion ( 144207 )
    ...when I first saw that headline, I thought it read "Nookie Media Terminal". Now THAT would be interesting...

  • Re:The Swiss army knife approach (Score:3)

    by barleyguy ( 64202 ) on Friday September 08, 2000 @10:51AM (#794304)
    I have a very similar computer (K6-2, Voodoo 3, DVD Drive), but I am also getting something called a Broadlogic 1020 Card, which is a DVB/Dish Network satellite reciever on a PCI card. It will be hooked up to a Dish 500 satellite dish. The display is a 72 inch Da-Tex rear projection screen with a Dukane 8050, 1800 lumen multimedia projector. It's also hooked to my surround sound system.

    Anyhow, if you want a swiss army knife, I agree that you should get computer components instead of a standalone box. More versatility...

    For people who don't have the technical knowledge to assemble their own computer, a standalone box is a good option. Tivo is pretty cool, as is the Dishplayer by Dish Network. This Nokia also looks like a good option.
  • Lazy man wires ugly up my house! They hang loose so the bare bulb in the ceiling will not light them on fire. One day, Big ugly box will sit next to other big ugly box, TV, naked in the open. Belch, pass the beer. That belly had beter stay in it's robe or someone will go blind.

    I'm not sure that the kind of person who buys this beautiful black box is going to put up with that, and the cost/trouble of real wiring in the wall is more than my set up.

  • Dude, I can't belive you have not heard of the Intel hair dryer. Quad Penium2000's have optical feedback and bar code scanner so you look perfect. Scanner tells MS what shampoo you use. Three netcams determine dryness of hair and sell your image as porn. As optimal dryness is approached, Penium2000 power savers kick in, deactivating one at a time: 1000 watts, 750 watts... Available in six stylen graphite candy colors.
  • with a little more for people who can't/won't configure all that stuff in a box. Oh yeah, my box is ugly.
  • Run SETI@Home while you dry your hair!
  • Ov course I just loved this bit from their Mediascreen web page:

    the platform is Linux, the sole truly open operating system which can

    incidentally be downloaded by anybody from the Internet.


    I guess the BSD license is just too verbose and restrictive for them to comprehend. Oh well, I guess I can't expect much better from their Marketing Weasels, at least they managed to spell "Linux" correctly.
  • I'm completely curious about the Nokia Navibars [nokia.com] that they speak of. What application is this? Did they base it on something GPLed? If so, where's the source, Nokia?

    Funny about the Linux line... Hehehe.

  • Actually there was/is a icon/logo that Nokia has used before: Three blue arrowheads pointing upright.

    I am not sure, maybe they are still using it somewhere?

  • Note that the mobile unit uses DVB as the downlink and GSM cell phone as the uplink. This will entail a broadcaster supporting the bloody things in your particular area.

    This could be a godsend for those broadcasters in the USA who are having a hard time coming up with the considerable scratch needed to meet the FCC's deadlines for HDTV transmissions. Using Digital Video Broadcasting they can still create a revenue stream (info delivery) while avoiding the many equipment changes that they would have to pay for HDTV support. All they have to do is get connectivity and a digital transmitter, which they would have to purchase in any case. They drop out of the video production biz (studios, camera, lights, editing gear, etc. all have to be changed or modified to fit HDTV...) and just concentrate on delivery, and let the cable folks pick up the broadcast segement. After all, there is little broadcast penetration in major markets anyway. It is all cable.

    Makes me wonder if Nokia is going to supply the back end of this. Anybody know?

  • Sir, you do have a machiavellian streak. While I do tend to share that attitude, I doubt that this is really in their plans. Do you really think the top execs at Nokia would risk releasing a truely broken product in an attempt to make Linux look bad? Do you really think they want to wake up the morning after the product gets released, just to hear on the news that hundreds of new web pages have sprung up, saying not only that Nokia's product is broken, but also how to fix it?

    Oh well, I'll probably wipe it, juat like I do anything with Windows, and load OpenBSD on it. Just think, I'd have the world's most secure DVR.

  • Nonsense.

    Nokia has been in this game for a longer time, building satellite boxes and even cable decoders.

    Btw, Sagem, a French company is also making mobile phones and dvb-decoders.

    Apart from that, it is not probable that end-users will be buying these boxes, cable-companies will probably rent these things to their users combined with access to their digital video signals (such as nvod, ppv, other interactive services, and internet-access over the cable's return path) -- and don't forget that these boxes are often very much customized to the demands of the cableco.

    A lot more factors than the sole price of an item determine who gets the order, and the number of features in this box is quite impressive!
  • Yup.. I did something like that on a little smaller scale too. Sears Hardware had really easy to use wire-tubes that attach to the wall with an adhesive surface. Fits a cat5 wire easily and took about 20-30mins to set up with all the planning. This was only for a 30ft piece though.. I had to go through 4 changes of directions(3 of which were corners) but the connecting pieces one could buy made the job really easy. Currently going next to the floor and up a corner it is virtually invisible.
  • I Did the same thing.
    Ran Plenum from 3rd story attic to the basement, and through a crawspace and up under the floor, I ran it from my shelf in the attic (which is my room) around the corner on the floor and into a perty box, and I ran it to my sisters room. Now I'm ready for BroadBand As soon as I get it. The hub Sits on a shelf overtop the spiral Staircase to my room, but I have the lights taped over so I can sleep at night.

  • Ah that's where it went

    Posted on wrong story

  • How expensive could this thing be? Intel architecture (celeron), video graphics card, Linux. The value here is the "media" software package (i.e. gateway/portal stuff).
  • But not with a BookPC...

    I once set up a Red Hat 5.2 system running XFree to display on TV via a VGA->TV converter I bought off of Ebay. The trick was that the VGA->TV converter needed a 640x480 display, @ 60Hz (IIRC), with a 15 Khz horizontal refresh (I think - it has been a long while). Anyhow, I managed to set up X to use this funky mode, and it displayed fine on the TV. Most cheap VGA->TV converters do this (because the hardware needed to convert other modes is more expensive - RAM for a frame buffer, then scan-conversion hardware, etc). I currently have in my Suse box a Hercules Voodoo Rush card I am hoping to get working like this.

    Poke around on my website - I may have the file listed, or maybe a link (look for Tomi Engdahl's site - lot's of good info there).

    Unfortunately, I forgot to save my xconfig settings when I removed RedHat (I kick myself everyday for doing this!)...

    I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
  • On the one hand, it is interesting to note that Nokia's North American headquarters are in Irving, Texas, immediately next door to the local headquarters for Microsoft.

    "Boy, that sure proves that it's a conspiracy!"

    On the other hand, there is a considerable Linux presence at Nokia, between the fact that:

    • A sizable LUG [ntlug.org] meets monthly at that Nokia campus, and
    • There are quite a few "Linux folk" at Nokia.

      Perhaps not "notable kernel hackers," but there certainly are a lot of engineers that use Linux...

    It all goes together to imply that things are seldom as "black-and-white" as they may appear to be...

  • I've got X 3.3.6 running on a TV here. It works with both Mandrake 7.0 and 7.1. The Mandrake setup didn't recognize the video card (which is an unusual thing) so it automatically installed a linux kernel with framebuffer support, and then the framebuffer X server. When it starts up, it automatically uses the frame buffer default mode (640 x 480 at 60 Hz, 16bpp) and the video card automatically puts that on the TV. Seems to work just fine, but not very fast as the FB driver obviously has no hardware acceleration.

    I tried to do the same thing on a different machine, using an ATI All-In-Wonder Rage Pro 128, and that worked too. But then I tried to upgrade to XFree86 4.0.1 using the tar.gz straight off XFree86.org, and it quit working. The problem seems to be that the X Server isn't finding the font server, or it's the wrong font server, or something. Getting that fixed (and displaying DVD's under Linux) is my project for the weekend. Woo hoo!

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • DVB is COFDM (coded orthagonal frequency division multiplexing). Search Google [google.com] for more information than you could possibly want on this format. But I'll give some here for the sake of information (no, not karma :) :

    As you might know, some broadcasters have raised issues with the 8-VSB standard presently in use in the US, claiming that it does not preform suffieiently well under multipath conditions such as the inner city that residents would instead opt for cable or satellite services (it would typically be either that or getting up and readjusting the antenna every time you changed a channel). They also claim that mobile reception (i.e., walking down a sidewalk watching TV or receiving data on, e.g., the next Palm, or tuning in while on the road) is significantly more reliable with COFDM-based systems such as DVB than the 8-VSB system is (although NxtWave claimed that they could solve this problem; however nothing has come yet, and COFDM by design can naturally cope with these situations well anyway; those better informed than I can fill in here). Independant and hopefully objective tests are currently in progress in and around the Washington, D.C. metropoliton area to substantiate these claims.

    This is yet another device that uses the DVB standard (which, BTW, is the standard in all but about 4 (?) other countries currently in transition to digital television; or in some cases a slightly modified standard is used). Another, also mentioned elsewhere in these comments, is the Nokia Mediascreen [nokia.com], a arm-held (a bit too big for hand-held) 12" TFT-display DVB reciever plus GSM phone access plus SMS plus Internet (and running Linux). I have used^H^H^H^Hplayed around with a prototype, and even if nothing else, it's cool enough to justify changing the standard just so the Europeans can't keep it for themselves :) .

    At the present, Nokia DVB products run Linux. Europeans and others privalaged with DVB television systems please show your support with your wallets (i.e., grab your Mediascreen as soon as it comes out), and US citizens... well we'll just have to wait and see how Congress reacts to the data gathered during the D.C. testing.

    In case you're wondering,
  • oops, ignore last line...

  • Recording TV (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This Nokia thingy is just a normal PC. You can record MPEG-2 streams from European satellites to your harddisk with a DVB-S pci card like the one from Siemens, which is the same card as the Hauppage WinTV DVB and a couple of other manufacturers. There are GPL'ed linux drivers for this card and someone even hacked up some digital vcr linux software for it, see here [cadsoft.de].

  • There are a handful of hardware & software based DVD players for Linux. Check out these past Slashdot articles:Are There Linux DVD Players on the Market [slashdot.org] and Linux DVD hardware support from SiS [slashdot.org].

  • Check Adomo.com [adomo.com], which makes something similar. ZDnet has an excellent article [zdnet.com] describing it.
  • Unfortunately, the Media Terminal won't be available until Q1 next year, according to Nokia Australia... apparently they haven't actually made it into production yet! Nice product brochure, though.

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