Get BitTorrent on Your TV with Myka
Until recently, if you’ve wanted to play videos you’ve downloaded on your TV, you either needed to hook it to your PC, buy an AppleTV, or use an Xbox. Now, one company aims to add another option - one which can get the videos itself, via BitTorrent.
The Myka box, is a small set top box, not all that dissimilar from the AppleTV although larger. Like the Apple product, it aims to be a video playback device for your television, able to pull video from computers on a local network. What makes the Myka different, however, is that it incorporates a BitTorrent client.
Incorporating torrent technology into a set-top box could be a very powerful driving force for the torrent community, bringing it into the homes and minds of many more people. Quite how Comcast will feel about it though, is another matter.
Technically, the box’s specs look good, with HDTV resolutions up to 1080i available. Of perhaps greater note is that it may be possible, with its h.264 support, to playback Blu-Ray torrents. Also, there has been suggestions posted to the Myka forums, that a Blu-Ray drive could be coming in the future. If so, it might cut into some of the sales the PS3 has been getting.
Hardware wise, the system seems solid enough. The only options, at present, are the size of the included hard drive. The OS, for those of you that care, will be a highly customised version of Linux. PAL versions, with SCART are also promised.
Legally, there are some worried about how the Grokster decision might affect things in the US. Selling a product which can infringe copyright was held in that case to be ‘contributory infringement’. Myka boss, Dan Lovy, told TorrentFreak “We’ve looked the legal side extensively. We are like a movie projector. It has kept the competition down though, to our advantage.”
Price-wise, its comparable with the Apple offering. The 160Gb model is $20 more expensive than the equivalent AppleTV but this may be felt by many, to be a small price to pay for access to the vast library of content available.
At present, we haven’t seen one in the flesh, so to speak. According to Myka, BitTorrent inc. is currently developing the torrent software, but we hope to bring you a full review as soon as possible.
Previously: German Court Decision Hands Big Win to File-Sharers
Next: BitTorrent Sites Show Explosive Growth
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Looks awesome, if I had a HDTV I’d be all over this :-)
I hate these kind of boxes because they never have all the audio & video codecs you need to watch files you download. If you can load CCCP, QuickTime, and RealVideo then you got the uber streambox. Until then, I’ll just use a laptop with a bluetooth trackball mouse as a remote.
… if its based on linux and installed on a hdd that is accessible it should be entirely possible, and easy, to pull out the hdd and add whatever codecs and features you would want.
I don’t really see the point of this though when you can build your own with only a little more effort than it would take to buy
Good Idea but $460 for 500 gig model. I paid $60 for an upconverting dvd player that lets me plug in usb flash drive. Also what would a virus do to this myka?
i just wanted to add that you can buy a dvd player that supports divx, and just burn the .avi files directly to blank dvd, and it will play them fine. they run at most $40.00 and can be found at any big box store.
You can build a HD capable HTPC for so cheap these days, these devices are just novelties. I have a HTPC and a fileserver, its all I will ever need to stream content to anywhere in my house. Only thing I’m short on is harddrive space!
This looks sweet. I can’t wait until these get popular.
http://pccurb.com
theory wrote:
Thats fine, if you’re just playing xvids, but if you’d RTFA you’d notice it does H264 as well. find a $40 DVD player that does that. Oh, and don’t forget the cost of the blanks, that mounts up over time.
A networked TiVo + Videora TiVo Converter works for me.
I want one!
this is looking really cool….
http://www.tech-nol.com
Sure we can all do it easier and cheaper, but think of how much this opens up the torrent market to those not on the leading edge of the wave like us… hopefully it is configured to leave their torrents seeding for a long time!
Josh wrote:
Lets do the math algebraically
Linux = no viruses = x
myka = Linux box =y
X+Y=Linux box named myka Linux!=viruses
A much better box is the popcorn hour a-100.
http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/
Will play almost every video and audio codec (including mkv)and if you put in your own hard drive it has a bittorent client also.
Only problem with it is that there is a waiting list to buy one. About a 2 month waiting time to buy one.
This looks great. On my end I use a modded xbox most of the time which plays anything I throw at. The 360 I have also works but it gets an attitude sometimes.
What you’ve got to concider is we, as people who use torrents frequently, are not the market they are aiming this product as, as alot of us have already got our own system for getting our vids on a tv. What it doing is trying to add to the legal side of bittorrent by maknig it more mainstream, which is very good for the protocol
**our videos onto a tv
**what they are doing is
**making
bertz wrote:
wut
Apple tv is a darned joke and so is this! Thieves!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Considering it can play networked media, isn’t the size of the HDD somewhat irrelevant? can’t you just pull out the recordings and have it stream the videos from your other PCs?
Yes, this requires some basic networking skill, but if you’re going to give the thing the ability to stream over a network, you may as well design it with techies in mind.
I agree with bertz - the more mainstream these become, the better it is for BTorrent - think of all those non-tech-savvy users, seeding movie files for ages without lifting a finger (assuming the thing auto-seeds)
Wonder how this thing searches for the files.Won ton searching, d/l could bring viruses. A novice in bittorrents
would be better off letting someone in the know set this up.If there is such settings.
quick tute on s-vid cables:
http://forum.superfundo.org/index.php?topic=4668.0
What happens when the videos it finds are in Rar format? Or the only torrent it can find of a movie is on a private tracker? Or the torrent is stuck at 97% because there are no seeders?
nothing my http://www.popcornhour.com/ cant do already
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