Roku, from founders of ReplayTV

Serial entrepreneur Anthony Wood (founder of ReplayTV, Dreamweaver, and other products) has started a new company to focus on the HDTV market. An HD PVR must not be too far behind, although I wonder about the HD space needed for HDTV.

[Roku is] the first digital media player to be designed for high-definition televisions, which are gaining in popularity as prices drop.

The HD1000 can play slideshows, video or music files from its four built-in memory card slots, or play files streamed from a computer via an Ethernet network connection.

AP - ReplayTV Inventors Aim at Living Rooms

Comments

[Thad]

Scientific Atlanta is working on the HD version:

http://www.scientificatlanta.com/customers/index.htm

[tudor]

I just setup a Pluto Home system (smarthome + media server, plutohome.com, free open source). It’s really cool. It has a streaming movie server, music server, pvr. Plus it does home automation and controls a/v equipment too. There’s only 1 problem…

You designate 1 PC to be the server; they call it the core. It exposes a network boot image for any other PC in the house, so your PC becomes dual purpose—normal pc, or net boot and it’s a set top box. You control it with Bluetooth mobile phones or web pads. And all the set top boxes in the house work together. Your media even follows you as you move from room to room if you keep the phone on. The problem is I don’t have enough media pc’s for all the rooms in my house, and buying a full PC for each room is too expensive. Plus there’s no video cards for the PC that have component video output—which is the only way I can get HDTV into my tv.

The Roku seems perfect as a media director. Right now, you can’t do a lot with it. But if it worked as a media director, it would be part of a whole house solution that did everything. I could even use the Roku’s menu to turn on my sprinklers if I wanted. Plus, since Pluto gives it a network boot image, space is no longer an issue—all the software could be stored on the main server. And the HD1000 has component video, it’s silent, and it already runs Linux.

Does anybody have an idea if it would be possible to use the HD1000 as a media director like that, doing a network boot? Then I could just buy a few of the Roku’s rather than having to buy regular PC’s.

[Todd Lokken]

Tudor...have you gotten an answer to your HD1000 question? Todd Lokken.