[ILUG] of mp3's and living rooms..

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi again,

On Thu, 09 Aug 2007, Paul Jakma wrote:

> Any opinions on the best[1] way to "mp3 enable" one's living room?
> 
> I've had those micro-FM-radio-station thingies suggested to me. Also 
> suggested is that many new stereos have USB connectors (they can read 
> MP3s from USB storage??).
> 
> Ideally I'm looking for something that will fit in nicely with a 
> micro-hifi stack (e.g. cause it is one :) ), with a consumer-friendly 
> UI.
> 
> Kevin Lyda has/had an older 'slimp3' thingy, and I see they're still 
> in business making some nice devices, so I might look there unless 
> people have other, better suggestions.

I just went looking for something like this myself.  After an amount of
searching last night, I came across these things:

http://www.rokulabs.co.uk/stores/news_stories_view.do?pubID=4409
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000IWV324/202-4739439-4615009
http://www.rokulabs.com/

which seem a pretty nice device at a pretty reasonable price.  I've just
ordered the basic home one from one of the amazon merchants.  For some
reason you can't order direct to Ireland, it has to be delivered within the
UK.

In order to make it work on linux and others, they've sponsored the
creation of an open source daap server (it doesn't read smb shares):

http://www.fireflymediaserver.org/

and have various other quite geek friendly ideas such as a telnet
interface for controlling it, printing things to the screen, etc.

http://www.last-outpost.com/~malakai/roku/index.html
http://groku.digitalssg.net/

Gavin