cliveb;149845 Wrote: > Just took a look at the YouTube video of the Sooloos in action. > > > They may have done some custom hardware, but that doesn't mean what the > system achieves can't be done with commodity H/W. As for "database > work", presumably that means they designed a suitable schema (just like > the Slim Devices folks did). Nobody in their right mind would build > their own proprietary DBMS for such a device. > > > Indeed it is. But what they achieve shouldn't be rocket science. Let's > be generous and say that the metadata + cover art for an album is as > much as 10kBytes. Even with a fairly large music collection of 10,000 > albums, the total size is 100 MB, which can easily be completely cached > in RAM. Add to that a bit of intelligent pre-preparation of all the > possible next screens that can be linked to from the current one, and > you arrive at the very slick performance we see. But the point is that > it can all be done with off-the-shelf inexpensive hardware. > > What this device *should* be doing is making people ask why so many > other media servers have such sluggish UIs (Slimserver, for example). > In my opinion, Slimserver is hobbled by the use of a web interface. It > doesn't matter how clever you get, the connectionless HTTP protocol is > a barrier to really snappy response. Sooloos have shown how much better > things can be using a well-crafted standalone application. Others should > take notice. Slimserver's UI could be made just as snappy if it were to > be rewritten from the ground up as a client server application - if it > were done in Java, it would still be platform independent.
Nice post Cliveb - I agree with pretty much everything apart from the fact that there are ALWAYS people mad enough to write their own DBMS - again. :0) ...also whilst HTTP is too sluggish, you wouldn't want the client to get too fat - but you would want a fair bit of intelligent client-side in memory caching (ooo this is fun) -- Phil Leigh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=28499 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
