My friend Brian alerted me to a really interesting multi-format media player from IO Data called the AVeL LinkPlayer. This thing has some very cool features, such as support for several A/V codecs, Ethernet playback (including server software), and attached USB drives. And it only costs about $250.
If the AVeL LinkPlayer can a) play WMA Lossless audio files, and b) connect to server software running on a Linux box, I'm sold.
Sure wish it could connect to iTunes and mt-daapd...
Update: Looks like StickyC got one!
A) According to the <a href="http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=484807">FAQ<a/>, the LinkPlayer's chipset can do lossless WMA, but the current firmware does not. IO Data seems fairly responsive to customer input, if enough people ask, they might make it a priority.
B) The "networked" element of it is more or less a web browser to the media library. I think there are certain special plugins to handle streaming media. I know IO Data has their own linux server, but it's unsupported and requires Apache 2. The LinkPlayer supports UPnP, so there's a bunch of back end software out there - most of which works at some level of compatibility. The good news is that since it's getting a lot of buzz, most of the back-end folks are making efforts to get compatible. I use one called <a href="http://www.geocities.com/flipflop7146/wizd.html">Wizd</a> that's compiled for Cygwin but runs just fine on my Debian media server. Wizd works fine for movie navigation, but the mp3 information is not cached and so browsing a large collection can be very painful. In fact, general browsing of the web UI is pretty painful, this appears to be a limitation of either the LinkPlayer itself or the wifi connection, as browsing the UI from my laptop on a hard connection is fairly fast.
Some other 3rd party servers:
http://www.twonkyvision.de/index.html
http://www.swisscenter.co.uk/ <- Looks very very cool, but has some environment limitations (requires PHP 4, not 5? Also wants Apache 2, I really should just break down and install it.)
http://www.jrmediacenter.com/ <- Not free
The other frustrating bit is that my existing wifi connection to the streaming server isn't fast enough for high-bitrate video (IE - DVD rips and WMA-HD content). Most of the TV rips play just fine though (including HD DiVX).
All-in-all, it looks like a totally hackable device and I wish I had more time to spend digging into it.
