What Animal Is Joe Eating?

DivX Connected

Posted: 7/18/2007

I received a new toy yesterday— it’s a DivX Connected box. You can’t buy one yet, and word is that DivX is using this as a test platform to license the technology to other vendors. Here is the box as delivered by DHL.

Opening the box-within-a-box showed a nice Quick Start Guide.

Here’s the box itself, neatly packaged.

This is the front of the box with a USB port to connect external storage or ???

Here’s the back of the box showing a nice complement of connectors: WiFi antenna; HDMI; coax digital audio; optical digital audio; s-video; composite video; analog audio; scart (for component video); ethernet; power.

I installed the box in my family room, connected to my four year old HDTV via component cables attached to the scart connection. The box is connected to my LAN via ethernet.

I installed the software on my server. Unfortunately, it doesn’t run as a service on it’s own, but that’s already been added to the developers’ todo list. My server has also developed an instability, so the beta software has been unable to complete a full media scan without locking up the server.

The box, which I have running at 1080i, has a nice menu, but isn't running as smoothly as I’d like— of course, my server issues could be causing that. One neat feature is in the music menu, where the on-screen graphics show a fan-out display of cover art from my collection— very nice.

Sadly, even though it’s a shiny new toy, I had little time to play with it yesterday. And it looks like the server maintenance that I've been putting off is now moving quickly to the top of my todo list. More later...

What Animal Is Joe Eating?

Updated 12/6/06

DivX Connected