Helpful HDV products? HD digital media player - Roku HD1000 & cheap HD card - useful?
 

Hi everyone,

I came across a few products that might be useful -

1) High-Definition digital media player Roku HD1000 at $499

2) pcHDTV - HD-2000 Hi Definition Television Card at $189 (for linux- which is technically free)

Just wondered if it could be useful in the HDV community?

It looks like for Roku supports "all 18 DTV ATSC MPEG2 formats". It's being promoted as something that'll plays "stunning photos, art, music and other digital media". After reading the specs - it plays MPEG2 "transport".

Also, it has component Y/Pr/Pb: 1080i, 720p and a "real time HD MPEG 2 decompression processor". (not to mention a ethernet card for HD transfers!)

So, can we use these for something? Apparently, there is no harddrive in the Roku..so, it's more of a passthrough decoderfor MPEG 2 TS?

http://www.rokulabs.com/products/hd1000/faq.php#1

http://pchdtv.com/

My brain is slow today, but I figured these could be used for something? Is it useful to us??? I'm drawing a blanks today..

Murph

Interesting...

Keep us up-to-date!

heath

The Roku is a great looking peice of HD hardware, but I think the software still needs a little developing. For those tweakers and software engineers it will be a facinating product. For us wanting a slick finished product, it might be frustrating. However, from what I've read, it is a set top box for your HDTV. It can play music and display pictures over a wireless network from files on a networked computer in another room. Over a wired network you can play video files -- even HDTV video files. Right now it only plays transport streams, but I have heard that it will play files captured from the JVC. It won't help you edit, but it will help you play your footage on your big screen in your livingroom.

Sounds promising...

Quick questions...

Can the 100T ether handle a transport stream big enough to make it worth while...my networks only gets 3.5MB/sec on a great day....that seems kind of slow...

Is there a way to feed it the new WMVHD9 files? That would be very cool...but again these files are running pretty fast...

It seems odd that they didn't put a gigabit ethernet connection on this thing. Though they say a 10/100 connection is fast enough for HD streaming. A firewire connection would have been a plus too.
It look like a great unit if you have your computers in one room and your HD TV or HD projector in another room, and want to stream HD movies or TV from your computer hard drives to that display device. That's what I would use it for.

I'm thinking of getting for that reason - I've got an HDTV.

Curious, how many here actually own an HDTV? This should probably be a new thread..

Murph

My emails with support at Roku indicated minimal support for high bitrate mpeg2 streams at the moment. I emailed them a short .m2t file and they could not play it at their lab.