I just posted a message to RokuAnthony asking when the Photobridge will be finished. This is his reply...

RokuAnthony wrote:

the photobridge is "finished".

If you mean, when will the 2.0 software update transition from beta to final, we don't have a firm date for that yet.

mlknez wrote:

I just posted a message to RokuAnthony asking when the Photobridge will be finished. This is his reply...

RokuAnthony wrote:

the photobridge is "finished".

If you mean, when will the 2.0 software update transition from beta to final, we don't have a firm date for that yet.

The only way the Photobridge would not be "finished" would be if they were still doing hardware development of it and considered the HD1000 to be a beta rather than a real product. RokuAnthony's reply makes perfect sense in that context.

Has the next beta come out yet?

No? Oh sorry, I read the calendar wrong and thought it was already 2006.

My bad. Apologies.

mlknez,

I don't really understand the point of this thread. We know that Roku never gives out dates and that they have recently been busy working on a different project. I think we are all assuming (hoping?) that version 2.0 will be complete at some point. We're just not holding our breath for it to be any time soon. In the mean time, I've been happy with the performance and functionality of my HD1000.

Are you trying to suggest that you believe something else is going on? You don't go into any details.

I just remember first buying the product and seeing that it would do music visualizations and the I would have an API and SDK that would exploit the FULL POTENTIAL of the Xilleon chip. It has been over 2 years and I still have neither. The box should be able to, at a minimum, pass a DTS or PCM signal, allow MPEG 2 program stream decoding, etc. Since we have no official release that allows ps decoding, I would say that the promises of the ORIGINAL release over 2 YEARS ago are not met. This is not even counting what was promised for release 2 of the firmware like soundbridge feature parity, better stability, etc. We as consumers must hold the vendors feet to the fire to deliver what was promised at the time that we purchased the product at least.

mlknez wrote:

I just remember first buying the product and seeing that it would do music visualizations and the I would have an API and SDK that would exploit the FULL POTENTIAL of the Xilleon chip. It has been over 2 years and I still have neither. The box should be able to, at a minimum, pass a DTS or PCM signal, allow MPEG 2 program stream decoding, etc. Since we have no official release that allows ps decoding, I would say that the promises of the ORIGINAL release over 2 YEARS ago are not met. This is not even counting what was promised for release 2 of the firmware like soundbridge feature parity, better stability, etc. We as consumers must hold the vendors feet to the fire to deliver what was promised at the time that we purchased the product at least.

You've summed up my feelings on this perfectly. I'm beginning to lose faith in the product even though I have 5 of them in my house. I was just looking back and realized it's been over 4 months since the last firmware update and absoloutely no positive input from Roku but wait and wait some more.

Roku, don't leave your customers out in the cold much longer, they're going to die.

mlknez wrote:

I just remember first buying the product and seeing that it would do music visualizations

The 'jumping' line that they have in Listen/Sonata is a visualization. Just not a terribly good one (I'm presuming you're looking for the type of ones you see in Windows Media player etc.).
They do have an API exposed for the visualization (VizData) but I don't think theres been a huge interest to develop 'proper' visualizations by 3rd party developers (though there was one simple visualization developed).

mlknez wrote:

Since we have no official release that allows ps decoding, I would say that the promises of the ORIGINAL release over 2 YEARS ago are not met.

By this you mean a non-beta release? (The beta does support PS of course). Yeah, I too would like the firmware 2 to be stabilised/released.

mlknez wrote:

This is not even counting what was promised for release 2 of the firmware like soundbridge feature parity

Slightly off-topic, but its sort-of amusing to see some people in the Soundbridge forums complaining about some of the better music related features on the PhotoBridge (which has much better music format support).

mlknez wrote:

better stability, etc.

Yup, totally agree.

Your concerns make sense. It just seemed from the initial post that you were trying to insinuate that the Roku was finished in the sense that it is no longer a viable product being supported by the manufacturer simply because RokuAnthony wrote that it was "finished". He obviously didn't mean that. I am looking forward, though, to the completion of 2.0. Much like the rest of you.

I was trying to show that the Photobridge 1000 never did the things that Rokulabs said it would do on the outside of the box on the first release of the HD1000. So in my mind it was not finished before it was released. Still after a couple of years, Rokulabs has still not produced a product that they were describing and the Alphas (beta usually implies nearly feature complete) that they have been floating still don't make the product complete. By feature parity with the soundbridge, they were implying, DRM, WMA, i-tunes support, etc. that the soundbridge has.

I wouldn't be too surprised if roku is waiting on code/fixes from ATI.

mlknez wrote:

By feature parity with the soundbridge, they were implying, DRM, WMA, i-tunes support, etc. that the soundbridge has.

Well, I think WMA support is an achievable goal anyway

At the very leats, I'd like to see the re-implementation of the Shuffle option. I'm still running 2.0.15 just for that reason. It stinks that the latest version is missing features in prior versions.

Roku, can you at least give us a quick patch to fix this?

soiaf, your WMA codec is way cool. I installed it and about 20% of my music library was restored to my HD1K.