whats this all about

[Robert Stratton]

On Oct 22, 2005, at 09:21, riese-k3djc at juno.com wrote:

>   http://www.pridenation.com/gbox/stats.htm     Bob k3DJC

I don't know about "Proud TV", but the Akimbo technology uses a set- 
top box that presents streaming video content from the Internet. I  
knew of a few niche programmers experimenting with this sort of  
technology right now, but I wasn't aware of any package programmers  
bundling a range of content services until now. You deploy a  
proprietary set-top box at home, and receive your video programming  
over your broadband connection. I expect you'll see more of this as  
things like Verizon's FIOS service are rolled out.

On the single-user side, one of the more interesting analogs to this  
is a thing called the Slingbox, which will stream your inputs (cable/ 
DVD/etc.) to a PC, and apparently (according to some of my home  
satellite hobbyist cohorts) has a spiffy adaptive codec that adjusts  
well to changing bandwidth/latency conditions. Sony has a thing  
called LocationFree TV, which does the same to either handheld TV's,  
the Playstation Portable, or a PC. From what I've heard LocationFree  
is using MPEG2 for inter-device local streams, and MPEG4 AVC for  
cross-Internet PC streaming. Current word on the street is that  
Sony's Internet transmissions are not ready for prime time (no pun  
intended).

All of these devices have IR blasters so that you can remotely  
control your A/V hardware over the Internet with the appropriate  
client software, for channel changing, etc.

If you don't want hardware at all, look on the Internet for a package  
called VLC or VideoLanClient. It is accreting features every day and  
is probably the Swiss Army knife of streaming video software. It  
tends to want as much CPU as you care to let it have.

--Bob