There are far too many BD audio formats already, AC3, DTS, DCA, DTS-master, etc, etc, etc. With a decent ($3000) surround-sound HT setup and 40 year old ears, I cannot tell much difference between any of them. I wish the BD producers focused more on doing better video transfers. I'd much rather they use the space wasted by these new audio formats on higher bitrate video (and the same goes for the useless, space-wasting extra features).

As far as I'm concerned, the only thing these extra audio formats do is make ripping the files & playing them back via an embedded streaming device more complex. My oldest device cannot handle any of these new fancy formats beyond AC3, so I need to remux newer BDs to add an AC3 sound track to the MKV.

Sigh

Besides spotty hardware supprt, AFAIK it is also missing VDPAU (HD video decoding) support, which is the main reason a lot of HTPC types use Nvidia cards in their linux machines. It is also fairly hard to remove. I think it took me 1/2 hour of re-booting before I finally purged nouveau from my system to clear the way so that the Nvidia driver could attach.

As a Linux (and other *nix) driver guy, I have tons of respect for how Nvidia deals with the constant, gratuitous changes in the Linux kernel APIs.

The telco (unless it is third world) will have massive diesel generators

I guess suburban USA counts as "3rd world" then.

I live roughly 100 miles from Washington DC just outside of Richmond, VA. Our power was restored a few days after hurricane Irene last summer. After our power was restored, our internet (and voip phone) was still out. After a while, I realized that it would come on for a few hours, then go off.

After meeting some neighbors (we'd just moved in 2 weeks before the storm and knew nobody in town), we finally realized that the telcom's local headend was located across a major highway in an area that did not yet have power. The times when we had power were when our neighbors, at their own expense, filled up the tanks on Comcast's diesel generator.

I agree that this is a very important feature, and very rare outside of full-on PC based media centers.

My current box (SageTV HD300 media extender) does this. It is very sad that SageTV was purchased by Google, and you can no longer purchase this hardware. This is the exact same Sigma tango3 hardware as the WDTV Live Plus (and probably a few others), so we know that low-end STB hardware is capable of it.

I'm not a ports tree committer. I maintain a few device drivers in the src tree. I'm much less active than I was 10-12 years ago.

And yes, I do know that there are packages. The problem with packages is that the packages are generally updated infrequently (like every point release), and when they are updated, they have new versions & dependencies, and not just bugfixes. So even if you (try to) do a binary update, you run into the same sort of unintended consequence where picking up a bugfix for package A hoses some unrelated package B.

Back when I ran FreeBSD on the desktop, I used linux versions of web browsers, just so I could go outside the ports tree to get something I needed the latest version of & not have to worry about the newer dependancies for a browser causing me to have to update ports & possibly break something.

IMHO, ports are the single biggest problem with FreeBSD.

.... Because a rolling release, build-it-yourself based software package model is too big of a hassle (ports tree, I'm looking at you).

I've been a FreeBSD committer for over 10 years. I ran FreeBSD on the desktop for many years, but I switched to running Ubuntu Linux 4 years ago on my desktop because "apt-get install foo" and "apt-get update" are about 10x simpler and faster than doing the same things using the FreeBSD ports tree, and I don't have time to deal with broken dependancies, unfetchable files, etc.

For those who don't know, FreeBSD base system is maintained directly by the FreeBSD "src" team, and is what constitutes a FreeBSD release. This is the "basic" stuff like the kernel, a few shells, fs utilities, ls, cron, a customized system compiler, etc. This stuff is rock solid, and security updates fix bugs.

The "interesting" stuff (X server, web browser, most shells, perl, python, IDEs, etc) are provided by a rolling-release based "ports tree". The big problem is that the FreeBSD ports tree is a "rolling" release. If you need to update your X server due to a bug, you risk breaking some totally unrelated piece of software which has had a version update. Worse, you have to compile all ports yourself when you update, so updates are unnecessarily time consuming and complex.

Compare this to say, an Ubuntu/Debian/Mint or RHEL/Centos/Fedora release where there are no huge surprises when updating. Every apt-get update or (or yum equivalent) fixes bugs, and you don't have to worry about an update to fix program "A" totally hosing program "B"

This is the same reason why Debian or Red Hat based distros are so much more popular than "rolling release" distros like Arch or Gentoo.

I have hope that the new PC-BSD might be as easy to deal with as Linux. I love their "PBI" concept, where every every package contains all of its dependencies. I'm planning to replace an older Fedora on my laptop with PC-BSD 9.

I've used this ... it has been very helpul for development, but I would not run it on a production machine. In most cases when I've run it, it has managed to eventually crash the machine, usually just after obtaining the information I was after. For driver development, that is fine. But not for production.

I'm running with this version, and it is working great for me on my first test machine (8T raid-z with an L2-ARC)

I'm a cord-cutter & I'm worried about the impact this will have on my free TV reception.

My understanding is that these devices are supposed to phone home, and find an "unused" UHF TV channel, so that they don't interfere with local TV broadcasts. But what is the definition of "unused" ? Will I still be able to pick up TV stations from 60 miles away, or will they be drowned out by the neighbors wireless gadgets? How about low-power (college / community) stations?

And then there are hacked gadgets (like people do now to enable wifi channel 14) and broken gadgets to worry about.

Google bought a small company called SageTV a few months back. They were one of the only companies offering a "whole house" PVR solution via tiny thin-client media extenders running on multiple TVs, and PVR software running on PCs. They had an extensible UI, as well as a number of features (like local media file management) that cable company DVRs either don't do, or do very poorly.

My guess is that they intend to apply the SageTV team to making cable boxes suck less; especially whole house solutions. Obviously they won't be using clients PCs as the server any longer, but a lot of the technology is applicable.