Neuros (was Re: IPod video?)

On Wed, 1 Feb 2006, john wrote:

> That reminds me: Anyone heard anything new from Neuros? Their concept of a 
> fully open (hardware and software) platform seemed quite promising. At least 
> I noticed there was a meeting with the rockbox developers.

There was a meeting. There's an open mailing list where they discuss their 
upcoming models that supposedly are to be open source.

There's already some source code available in their Subversion repository.

They are gonna make at least three different players based on the same 
platform. The platform of choice includes a TI DM320 chip with an ARM926 core.

Given the reasoning on the mailing list mentioned above, they are going for 
Linux on all their units. They have not mentioned what apps or similar that 
they would base things on, or if they plan to write everything from scratch. 
They did mention using nano-x for grahpics.

* They say they want to do it open source, yet they design and work along very
   much without releasing any source code. Even discussing GUI design and
   everything.

* Chips from TI come with no docs what so ever for us mere mortals so we can't
   get our hands on the actual low-level info.

* They claim they will support WMA for example by buying the necessary
   codec(s), but I find it very interesting to see how that is gonna make it
   into a Linux/Open source player that I would suspect is gonna involve a fair
   share of GPL licensed code.