UPnP support could be a solution, and outsourcing the entire SC instance would be most desirable (with VPS prices these days, it's not too far over the horizon for DIY).
I think the OP has a point. Cost of such an embedded-SC device could be contained if it was an 'NSLU2' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2)-style, with ports to attach peripheral USB disks and CDROM drives for storage and ripping. It's not a stretch to see SC7 run on such a device (the hardware in an modern mobile handset is nearly sufficient). A PC could manage it as a USB slave device or via web interface. So BOM would at least need: modern CPU (Intel Atom comes to mind), 256MB-512MB of RAM, sufficient flash memory for OS+SC+future, wireless and wired NICs, USB controllers, PSU, case. SD/Logitech is already supporting one such platform (the controller) which has most of the necessary features (though not in the necessary quantity for a good user experience running SC), so I don't see why it would be too hard to apply that experience to a SC appliance. This would also be a great reason to rework SC to be less resource hungry. I am still baffled by the incredible memory consumption and poor web UI performance (400-2000 msec per pageview on modern 1+ GHz hardware is shockingly slow). IME, SC uses much more memory than the combined footprint of a standard Redhat/Fedora installation, and this is before the first library scan (starts at 60-80MB, grows to 110-150MB with 10k tracks). Fortunately SC7 seems pretty stable, and hardware is cheap these days. I wouldn't trade the cross-platform or reliability aspects for better performance. The economics clearly exist: wouldn't an 'Apple TV' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV) (released over two years ago) have nearly everything necessary after stripping out the disk? I can buy an MSI Wind PC for '$150' (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856167032) at retail today. This sounds like a modest undertaking on the hardware side, so I would guess that research indicates there is simply not a large enough market for such a device (or a preference for players with more in-built functionality, Roku-style). If the "success" of WHS and the original NSLU2 are any indication, the market for such a device is probably smaller than we forum regulars might hope. -- syburgh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ syburgh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=14239 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=52559 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
