I think this has its roots going all the way back to DivX...
First considered as a bunch of hackers that have stolen some of Microsoft video codec work and renamed it DivX, they have come a long way...
But this most likely would still be the case if Asian companies wouldn't take over the DVD player manufacturing market: from chipsets to packaging.
They started looking "what else" can you make a DVD player do and MPEG-4 part 2 decoding (DivX and Xvid being two best examples) was the obvious choice.
It took a few years and Sony even incorporated DivX playback in the Playstation box. Microsoft followed (must have been hard for them...
)
Whoever survived that DVD player fiasco got much smarter.
Sigma Designs, supplying decoder-chips to many BD players since day one, quickly stripped DRM handling capabilities off their chips and started selling the new models to player manufacturers like Popcorn Hour. And since BD encoding specs have been known for years, and the open source community had one of the best encoder in the business (x264) and one of the best containers (MKV), this was a repeat of the DivX phenomenon but for hidef video: all those players can play not only native BD files, but also re-encoded copies most often found on torrents...
Newer players in this chip market - like Realtek used for example in Patriot - have all the same capabilities...
Sigma decided to take the next step - support XBMC on the chip level
Sigma Designs announces direct XBMC support for wild next-gen streamers -- Engadget
Diogen.
First considered as a bunch of hackers that have stolen some of Microsoft video codec work and renamed it DivX, they have come a long way...
But this most likely would still be the case if Asian companies wouldn't take over the DVD player manufacturing market: from chipsets to packaging.
They started looking "what else" can you make a DVD player do and MPEG-4 part 2 decoding (DivX and Xvid being two best examples) was the obvious choice.
It took a few years and Sony even incorporated DivX playback in the Playstation box. Microsoft followed (must have been hard for them...
)Whoever survived that DVD player fiasco got much smarter.
Sigma Designs, supplying decoder-chips to many BD players since day one, quickly stripped DRM handling capabilities off their chips and started selling the new models to player manufacturers like Popcorn Hour. And since BD encoding specs have been known for years, and the open source community had one of the best encoder in the business (x264) and one of the best containers (MKV), this was a repeat of the DivX phenomenon but for hidef video: all those players can play not only native BD files, but also re-encoded copies most often found on torrents...
Newer players in this chip market - like Realtek used for example in Patriot - have all the same capabilities...
Sigma decided to take the next step - support XBMC on the chip level
Sigma Designs announces direct XBMC support for wild next-gen streamers -- Engadget
Diogen.
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