We were lucky to be invited to DivX technology demo driven by DivX co-founder Jrme Rota. The prototype presented was an efficient, low-cost, networked media player running at 720p resolution. The box itself was just an example of what manufacturers could do with the DivX platform. The interface is sleek and all and a few things caught my attention:
The media player needs to be networked to a computer and software need to be installed on that PC to communicate with the player… some of you might complain because the device should be able to talk to a DLNA network drive, but: most consumers do have a PC but they don’t have a network drive. Secondly, the device in question could eventually be sold for less than $99 within a year of production – in my opinion. That’s a lot less than the $299 Apple TV.
The user interface was quite nice. Much better than what we usually get in this type of device (think Apex, Linksys…), but the crunchy part is that all the user-interface (UI) rendering is done on the PC and sent to the player as very small DivX files! That’s a good idea that enables good graphics and UI on cheap hardware.
Finally, DivX has an API that will let users create their own plug-ins/applications to handle multimedia content or to create casual games. I don’t think that any other media player does this.
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[Source: Ubergizmo]
