Cringely mentioned the Hauppauge MediaMVP gadget in his column. It’s a semi-cute toy: a stand alone box which connects to 10 or 100 megabit ethernet, and streams media files from your PC to your television. It sells for somewhere between $80 and $100, which is pretty cheap.

What’s really interesting is it’s hack potential. According to a users forum, it contains some interesting hardware: a variant of the PowerPC made by IBM for set top boxes, 64 megabytes of RAM and an MPEG-2 decoder. What’s more, it runs Linux using Busybox, which it boots via tftp from the host PC. In other words, you don’t have to do anything amazing to get new software to it, just build the right boot images and place them in the right place. Neat.

Apparently it does not have sshd or telnetd installed on it, only

 [, busybox, cat, cp, date, dhcpc, du, echo, fpage, ifconfig, init,
insmod, kill, killall, linuxrc, ls, lsmod, modprobe, mount, mpgdec,
msh, mv, ping, ps, pwd, reboot, rm, rmmod, route, sh, sleep, test,
umount 

but it does have NFS support built into the kernel, so in theory you could mount media files from Linux/whatever boxes and play them on your TV. Again, nifty.

If this gadget were wireless, I’d be considering it strongly, but I don’t have ethernet anywhere near my television at the moment. I wonder how long it will be before you can buy a television with gadgets like this built in. I’d easily spend another $80 to have this thing inside my next television.