(A lil “drive-by posting” amid a jammed up day. *heh* I love having “spare posts” saved for days like today.)
The natives are restless. Growing weary of proprietary formats that lock ’em outa using their media the way they want to, cranky about irretrievable corrupted files written in formats that defy recovery and reconstruction but encourage corruption and failure, some Apple product users—including power users and Mac gurus—are abandoning ship.
Just in time, another Linux-based product for media addicts. The Linux-based Omni, from Titan Global Entertainment is a PMP (portable media player) that TGE is positioning as
“…a more featureful, lower-cost alternative to Apple’s iPod Video product.”
Check the feature set:
Will it be a video iPod killer? No, of course not. But it may offer one avenue of escape for those held in iPod slavery. And as more alternatives come along (hopefully more and more alternatives in the open source community), I think more people will welcome an escape from iPod hell.
Yeh, I do seriously hope for more Linux-based media options. In fact, as we continue to upgrade things here at third world county central, I’m even looking at building a media PC using a Linux-based solution. It’ll be a while before we want or need that, but I can see it coming, and there are some decent open source media center solutions out there, now.
For handheld devices, this lil Omni looks like a really nice deal. DivX a few videos, DVDs (Yeh, I bought ’em, I should be able to view ’em where and when I want), mp3 a few more [pieces of my music recordings collection, even interface the puppy with my car stereo (yeh, there are $30 USB devices for that)… I could see it working not only for me but for a lot of other people.
Especially since it uses standard formats I can manage and easily and safely backup.