More > Media Center 14 (Development Ended)

New -- Playing files from memory

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newsposter:
just a thought...

"Play from memory" would be extremely useful in an embedded application such as the MC appliance we keep reading hints about.

Load XP Embedded and MC onto a flash card or DoM (don't even need a fancy/expensive SSD) and boot from there.

The MC library data (media) is kept on a different piece of flash media, also very inexpensive.

When XP Embedded boots up and MC starts, the media that is nominally stored on that second piece of flash is copied into system ram for playback.

Considering that an SSD is $300- and a pair of 512 Mb DoMs is less than $50-, this would really affect the delivered price of an appliance.

JR could even sell the pair of DoMs as an unsupported DIY package.  Say 3x or 4x the nominal hardware cost.  Set up XP Embedded to do some serious hardware checking as a QA kind of thing, but it's very do-able.

XPE has a few cheesy encryption options (or just use TrueCrypt) that would provide some basic copy-protection for the OS and MC.

In my mind (and assuming the devs have at least a passing familiarity with XP Embedded), this is about a weeks effort to prototype, another month for QA and two weeks to set up an encryption scheme for the boot DoM.

Or, see if MC can be made to run under something like TinyCore Linux and the current version of Wine.  No MSFT distro license costs there.

JimH:
news,
Thanks for the suggestion.

Jim

Pjotr:
I don’t know if this is a real issue but regular HDD are not well optimised for streaming. For streaming purposes with media boxes there are special designed HDD on the market. So from this viewpoint, moving as most as possible at once in ram from the HDD will be beneficial with regular HDD.

Any thoughts about this?

jamesecox50:

--- Quote from: CadErik on July 16, 2009, 08:40:43 pm ---Yeah me either - the disk activity to read flac files or any other lossless format should be negligible.

Erik.

--- End quote ---

Old post but it made a diff on my system, I used SSD drives and when I went to spinning external disks I had noticable degradation. I actually did blind tests with listeners.  The drive was a WD myBook.

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