Meedio Celebrates 200 Media Center Plugins

By Ian Bell April 16, 2005

Meedio announced that its developer community has submitted 200 plugins, themes, and extensions to the Meedio Add-In Directory (MAID). To celebrate, the company is discounting its Meedio Essentialsdigital media center application to $20.00 until April 30. Meedio Essentials, which recently won a 2005 CES Innovations and Design award, normally retails for $59.95 from the company’s website atmeedio.com. The application, built on topof Meedio’s open platform, is favored by many developers for the ease with which it can be customized and extended.

Meedio Essentials turns an existing PC into a media center by letting users organize and access their digital media with a television and remote control. Meedio Essentials is completely customizable, with access to innovative plugins for RSS news, Skype, Netflix, recipes, web browsing, movie listings, and many more. The full list of 200 add-ins can be freely downloaded from the Meedio Add-In Directory at meedio.com/maid and also from within Meedio’s “10 foot” television interface.

Meedio also offers Meedio HouseBot, a home automation server that allows users to monitor and control their lights, appliances, A/V equipment, and other devices using customizable graphic interfaces for PCs, touchscreens, TVs, and PDAs. Meedio HouseBot supports a growing list of popular devices including X10, Z-Wave, IR, and RS232. Meedio HouseBot normally retails for $99.95 but as part of this promotion Meedio is selling both products together for only $109.95.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Emerging Tech

Publisher

I work with the best people in the world and get paid to play with gadgets. What's not to like?

Emerging Tech

Tiny galaxy has huge black hole at its center, gives clues to galactic evolution

tiny galaxy supermassive black hole a with big heart

Nestled within this field of bright foreground stars lies ESO 495-21, a tiny galaxy with a big heart. ESO 495-21 is just 3000 light-years across, a fraction of the size of the Milky Way, but that is not stopping the galaxy from furiously forming huge numbers of stars. There are also indicators for a supermassive black hole in its center -- an unusual component for a galaxy of its size. ESA/Hubble, NASA

This image gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 shows the tiny galaxy ESO 495-21, located 30 million light-years away in the constellation of Pyxis (the Compass).

Emerging Tech

Amazon’s new fulfillment center machines pack boxes up to 5x faster than humans

taylorism workforce amazon warehouse

From drone deliveries to checkout-free brick-and-mortar stores, Amazon has made no secret of its desire to automate as many parts of the retail experience as possible. While Amazon employs thousands of people in its fulfillment centers, it may be because it hasn’t yet figured out a way to automate their role. Until now, that is. Things could be about to get even more dicey for human workers as Amazon is reportedly rolling out machines capable of boxing up customer orders.

According to Reuters, Amazon has considered using machines at dozens of warehouses, removing at least 24 roles at each one. Because each machine costs $1 million plus operational expenses, it would likely take Amazon a little under two years to recoup the cost of installing the machines. The machines are manufactured by Italian firm CMC Srl, and are called CartonWrap. They are able to pack up to 700 boxes per hour, which is four to five times the rate of a human packer. Each machine requires a human operator to load customer orders, another to stock cardboard and glue, and a technician to fix jams when and where required.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.