Watch out, Apple TV. This little box could eat your lunch.
DivX and its content portal Stage6 chose Pixelodeon, which they are helping to sponsor, to unveil their top secret consumer electronics project. The long-rumored media extender device, codenamed “GejBox;-)” after the founder, has everything you need to bring online video into your living room — WiFi and Ethernet inputs and Component, S-Video and HDMI video out.
In other words, exactly what I’ve been waiting for.
Just entering the beta testing phase, the plans for the device include everything from licensing the chipset to other consumer electronics manufacturers to creating an open application programming interface for third-party developers. The current device is just a proof of concept, and as Engadget points out, probably won’t be sold as it exists currently.
The price point promises to be pretty low — there’s no hard disk or CPU. Software on your computer converts the display data to a DivX video stream, which is decoded by DivX’ hardware on the device side, meaning there’s no need for additional processing or storage. It also means that anything from interactive menus to video streams, mRSS viewers to iTunes downloads can be displayed on your television in up to 1080i HD.
There’s an incredibly market opportunity here, because besides supporting nearly any video format, there’s already massive amounts of video already encoded into DivX and its open-source sibling xVid (like almost every video on your favorite torrent tracker). And by keeping the architecture relatively open, manufacturers and hackers and like can further extend the feature set.
To sign up for the beta, drop by the DivX Labs blog.
How does this differ from a DLink DSM-510 which has been shipping for a year?
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=542
Pretty cool. Would love to do a “How To” on this one.
Very cool. This market is going to continue to expand. We support anything that helps get great independent content out to the masses.
Let’s just hope that they don’t forget the ease-of-use factor. Make this as easy as a TiVo (or Apple TV) so that non geeks can make it work.
[...] Divx makes Gejbox, takes on Apple TV. (link) [...]
Mr. Smirl, perhaps I’m not technical enough to answer that. But to start, this product is still in development, so what I describe here may not be the final feature set. Largely, I think it’s the expressed willingness on the part of the people I spoke to at DivX to create an open platform, either through licensing the hardware or opening up the device to third-party software developers.
[...] and see more pictures here Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and [...]
[...] DivX Raises Curtain on ‘GejBox’ Watch out, Apple TV. This little box could eat your lunch. [image] DivX and its content portal Stage6 chose Pixelodeon, […] [...]
[...] DivX Launches Connected, A Media Extender DivX (DIVX), a San Diego, Calif.-based online video technology company is expanding its reach into the living room. The company showed off Connected, its media-extender platform, that uses chips from Sigma Design (SIGM), and is able to pull various different types of multimedia content from a PC connected to the home network. The Connected-box was code-named GejBox. [...]
[...] de contenido multimeda de un PC conectado a una red casera. Connected es lo que se conocía como GejBox (si visitais el enlace veréis fotos del dispositivo) cuando se estaba [...]
[...] NewTeeVee reports that the device has no hard disk or fully-fledged CPU, and instead the connected PC handles most of the work by converting its display data into a DivX video stream which can then be decoded at the other end using the GejBox’s built-in DivX chip. The fact that the device doesn’t need additional processing power or storage should make it a lot cheaper than its competitors. [...]