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FIC to Roll Out Linux Video Player

Taiwanese motherboard maker FIC will unveil a Linux-based portable media player (PMP) at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. FIC's "Vassili" includes a 3.6-inch color LCD screen and a 20GB hard drive, and can play multimedia content downloaded directly from PCs and PVRs (personal video recorders) in a number of formats.

The PMP market appears to be heating up, with InStat/MDR projecting close to 180 percent annual growth through 2008, and several vendors, including Archos, iRiver, Veritouch, and Zupera have recently announced new Linux-based PMPs. Several new PMP reference designs, including those from Sharp and Freescale, support only Microsoft's Portable Media Center software. FIC's Vassili -- which appears to be intended as both an end-user product and a reference design -- supports only Linux at this point, although the company says the platform is also capable of running Windows CE.

The FIC Vassili is based on AMD's Alchemy Au1200, a highly integrated SoC (system-on-chip) designed specifically for PMPs. The chip is currently sampling.

The Vassili includes a built-in 20GB hard drive and large, 3.6-inch color LCD display. It also includes TV- and audio-out ports, a built-in speaker, a USB 2.0 device interface, a USB host interface, and a 10/100 Ethernet LAN port. An included docking station supports s-video.

The Vassili's 20GB hard drive can store up to 80 hours of video (320 x 240 at 500kbps AVI format) or 1,200 hours of music (Windows Media format at 64kbps), FIC says. The design includes a rechargeable/removable lithium-ion battery said to deliver up to four hours of video playback, or 12 hours of music playback. Supported multimedia formats include MPEG4, MP3, WMA, WAV, ASF, AVI, and JPEG.

Read the rest of the story at LinuxDevices.com