VIA unveils convergence box for the living room
Posted by Daniel Fleshbourne on 09 October 2002 - 18:00 · 2 comments & 173 views
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Full name: Daniel Fleshbourne
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Named the Hi-Fi PC, the box containing the 17cm x 17cm board combines instant-on playback of all the digital video and audio formats, including CD, DVD and VCD in an aluminium-housed PC system.
The box sports a Flash memory BIOS combined with media playback code to support disk play at the touch of the remote control.
The device was unveiled by VIA President and CEO, Wenchi Chen in his opening address to the Tehcnology Forum. VIA says it expects to market the device in Q1 2003.
The company also unveiled a new RISC chip for PDAs and mobile phones, which it also expects to introduce early next year.
New Skin
In addition to the corona skin being the new default WMP9 skin (called 9seriesdefault) they have included a smart new skin called Quicksilver (screenie below) look for it in the Skin Browser. Corona is now resizeable and many visual bugs have been fixed
Known Issues
Personal Firewall issue: If you have a personal firewall product installed on your computer, in some cases Windows Media Player fails to receive content over a network and in other cases the Player may crash when trying to receive streaming content. The problem is related to the firewall software that is not yet able to handle new Windows XP and Windows .NET Server networking APIs. Windows Media Player 9 Series Beta Refresh (build 2800) addresses this issue.
Surround Sound Speaker Setting issue: If Windows Media Player starts to play audio but there is no sound, check to see if your speaker settings are set to Surround Audio. There is a known issue in Windows Media Player 9 Series Beta where the Player may crash when you play regular stereo or mono WMA content while your speaker settings are set to Surround. Even if the Player does not crash, you still won't hear any audio. Windows Media Player 9 Series Beta Refresh (build 2800) addresses this issue.