Written by Liz Gannes
Posted Wednesday, October 10, 2007 at 9:30 AM PT

 

Joost and DivX, Sitting in a Tree?

Joost will be available as a plug-in on the open DivX Connected device set to launch next month, DivX co-founder Jerome Vashisht-Rota has told UK gadget site Pocket-lint.

DivX Connected, unlike competitive devices such as the Apple TV, is an open platform, but the company and Joost are nonetheless explicitly “working together,” according to DivX’s Vashisht-Rota. Update: Pocket-lint has updated its story to say a DivX spokesperson clarifies that the company is “talking with Joost” rather than “working together” with Joost. We wrote up Connected after attending a press and blogger preview in August, where the company demoed the use of DivX spinoff Stage6’s video-sharing service on the Connected device. We also recently did a video interview with Joost CEO Mike Volpi in which he talked about how “over the long term” he’d like Joost to be on platforms that connect to the television set.

DivX — which is launching its software onto D-Link media extenders — has no market or mindshare in this space yet, so this tie-up is not necessarily going to have a huge effect. Getting Internet TV into the mainstream living room, however, is a big deal.

Follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the feed

Sphere
Topic: Hardware, Software

Comments (7)

  • Joost as a plugin on the D-Link platform appear highly unlikely in the short term. A recent interview on paidContent mostly paint Joost on a set-top box as a 12+ months window. But who knows.

    Joost and DivX are using two different codec. So for Joost to play on the DivX platform the platform would have to decode h.264 content… not DivX… unless it is able to transcode on the fly… which I doubt.

    bmaltais — 10:09 AM on October 10, 2007 Reply

  • Also note that there was update after the original post:

    UPDATE: DivX has got in touch with Pocket-lint since publishing this story to suggest that it is “talking with Joost” not actually “working together” with the Web TV company.

    “We are talking to a lot of parties about DivX Connected”, a spokeswomen for the company told Pocket-lint.

    bmaltais — 10:13 AM on October 10, 2007 Reply

  • Thanks bmaltais — that update wasn’t in the version of the story I saw. I’ll update my post.

    Liz Gannes, NewTeeVee — 10:33 AM on October 10, 2007 Reply

  • I do believe that even if Joost with its H264 will be able to be played on the Connected, due the whole operation is made on the PC. In this case the CPU must be strong enough to transcode on the fly it to DivX that will be delivered to the device later on. I like the Openness of the system and the power of Community that will make this solution valuable for others.

    Lancelot — 11:37 PM on October 10, 2007 Reply

  • I’ve been waiting for a while now to see some news from the joost team on the Linux client. As i had read in the joost forum the long awaited linux version is in similar developing stage as the Windows and MacOS clients and the only way they did not release it to the public was because they waited till joost would be supported through a set top box. Visiting the DivX Connected website it says that it has some sort of open platform which i guess is some type of embeded linux kernel. So that is some good news i have been waiting for. Most of the time the new cutting edge experimental software do not have a native linux version although for instance joost uses Linux servers and open technologies for it’s own benefit..

    Nick K. — 6:34 PM on November 3, 2007 Reply

  • Don’t forget the Neuros LINK, we’ve got Joost support too: http://open.neurostechnology.com/content/joost-tv-link

    JoeBorn — 10:26 AM on December 13, 2008 Reply

Linkbacks (4)

Subscribe to comments feed

Leave a Reply

Sign up for our daily email: