I wandered into an area CompUSA today with my coworker and discovered a very cool device. It’s the Hauppauge MediaMVP. The MediaMVP is a Linux multimedia platform which can play MPEG1/2 movies and MP3 music stored on a server elsewhere on a LAN. It is Linux-based, comes with a remote control, and costs a mere $100. If I didn’t have to figure out how to stuff it into my suitcase for the flight home, I would have bought one on the spot!
There are a few pages devoted to hacking the MediaMVP, possibly to get DivX or OGG support added. The MPEG decoder is a common IBM chip (also used in Tivos, I believe) which unfortunately doesn’t have open-source drivers. The chip might not be much help with OGG or DivX media, either, unfortunately. Still, a hackable media platform for $100 is hard to ignore!