New firmware 8.1.3 - Printable Version +- Devialet Chat (https://devialetchat.com) +-- Forum: Devialet Chat (https://devialetchat.com/Forum-Devialet-Chat) +--- Forum: Devialet News (https://devialetchat.com/Forum-Devialet-News) +--- Thread: New firmware 8.1.3 (/Thread-New-firmware-8-1-3) |
RE: New firmware 8.1.3 - Hifi_swlon - 18-Nov-2015 (18-Nov-2015, 21:17)jjo Wrote: …... AIR would probably break and become unusable with the next operating system upgrade after Devialet was gone. I suppose that depends on your perspective and how lucky you've been…. Air is already broken and unusable in my setup on OSX. In fact, I've never had the luxury of seeing it working. RE: New firmware 8.1.3 - Antoine - 18-Nov-2015 (18-Nov-2015, 21:17)jjo Wrote:(17-Nov-2015, 17:25)Antoine Wrote: If only it was that simple... Dialog and Expert are entirely different architectures. There's a general purpose CPU presumably running Linux inside a Dialog but FPGA's inside the Experts. Worlds apart! I agree, code can be ported however we know that there's a powerful general purpose CPU (quad core 1GHz) running in the Dialog, a generous amount of RAM (1GB) and 2GB of storage space in flash memory. I don't know the details but I think it's safe to assume that's much more powerful hardware than that inside the Experts which merely has a FPGA with little/no external RAM and probably limited flash storage. It's also safe to assume Dialog runs some Linux distribution and other open source software running in it. To port the Dialog solution one would have to find a lean Linux distribution that can run on the FPGA using the presumably little amount of memory available, port the uPnP/OH software and all it's dependencies. Again, I don't think it's easy and it might not even be possible. At least I'm very sure it'll not be as easy a you suggest it to be. Good points about the proprietary nature of AIR vs. the open source uPnP/DLNA/OH solutions and it's limited OS support however for me the evolutionary step back I mentioned for me lies in it's usability properties. The AIR solution provides a much greater amount of flexibility as long as you run it on a system that's supported. Any software that can output sound can use AIR including advanced and powerful room correction software, try that with UPnP. Even gapless playback is a challenge, and before you "protest" yes I know it can be done including routing PC sound output but developing a mature/stable solution that complete, now THAT would be extremely costly. People do like to run NAS'es so Devialet could consider porting AIR to Linux or specific Qnap/Synology/... versions. I don't think they'd have to support all and any operating systems out there. Also I don't agree that every new OS breaks the AIR functionality, not completely at least and updating their drivers shouldn't require more than some tweaking in most cases. However I'd prefer Devialet to stick to their core business and do what they're good at. Software, thus far, isn't something they've shown to be good at (to put it mildly). They could also consider licensing streaming technology like Ravenna (for example) which even exeeds AIR in some/most regards and let their supplier worry about operating system support and lifecycle management. They've done exactly that with their USB solution as well (using XMOS/Thesycon) so why not. |