Siliconchef by Brian Richardson
Okay, here’s a company that won’t be getting my money because they missed the point.
{{link http://www.prismiq.com/ PRISMIQ}} makes this nifty set-top media player that got great reviews at CES. It’s $249, supports wired or wireless networking, comes with a free keyboard for a limited time, and plays all kinds of audio/video formats using a nice remote-control interface.
The PRISMIQ Media Player runs Linux & pulls media files from the local network. This requires the user to install their Media Manager software, which only works under Windows.
Let me repeat that … their Linux-based device does not support Linux. I refer you now to their FAQ …
Question: Does the MediaManager work with Linux Operating Systems?
Answer: We do not have plans in the near future to release a commercial version of the MediaManager for the Linux OS on the computer. The MediaPlayer does use an embedded version of Linux ( Debian 2.4), let us know if you interested in joining the PRISMIQ Developer’s Forum, a community we plan to promote in the Spring of 2003.
Did anybody at the company not notice that’s it’s really not hard to make Linux see other Linux systems on the network? So I can’t use this system in my house, since my media server is running {{link http://clarkconnect.org ClarkConnect}}. Looks like the tiny {{link http://slimdevices.com/ SLIMP3}} is still the top choice for playing media in my home … it may have fewer features, but it doesn’t require the TV and it’s OS-agnostic.
We are changing the FAQ as the NOT was a typo. We love Linux – the first version was written on Linux.
Sorry, here’s how it should read:
Answer: We do have plans in the near future to release a commercial version of the MediaManager for the Linux OS on the computer. The MediaPlayer does use an embedded version of Linux ( Debian 2.4), let us know if you interested in joining the PRISMIQ Developer’s Forum, a community we plan to promote in the Spring of 2003.
Thanks Nate. Very descent of you to respond. That does change my outlook a bit. I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.
I’ll give Prismiq this, they are standing by their word, and have released a "preview" edition of their server for Linux. It isn’t at full quality yet, but they are moving in the right direction, which convienced me to buy one. See http://www.prismiq.org for more details.