Originally Posted By: tahir
Originally Posted By: DWallach
An AppleTV might solve your problem. With the TV on, it can stream video from a Mac (and with third-party add-ons, can do DVD images and other non-Apple video formats). With the TV off, it has a perfectly reasonable SP/DIF optical output which can drive your stereo. You can control it remotely from an iPhone/iPod Touch with Apple's "Remote" application, which is very well done, or you can stream to it from a Mac or PC laptop using Apple's "AirTunes".

I'm a little Mac averse, plus I don't have an iPhone or iPod. I already work with several flavours of Windows as well as RedHat and CentOS, another OS would probably tip me over the edge. A Win/Linux version of it with a big (SB like) VFD (maybe external USB connected?) could do the job though.

I'm a little Mac averse (at the moment, until I scrape enough together for a Mac Pro), but I wouldn't really make that a concern when considering the AppleTV. I set my parents up with one and they love it, and they only have one Windows machine.

I think the AppleTV is a great product, and handles music and video playback excellently. I've also installed those third party apps someone mentioned, and now I can bring them video files in almost any format and it'll play them.

Originally Posted By: tfabris
Originally Posted By: DWallach
An AppleTV might solve your problem.

That was my first thought, but he specifically said it should be something with its own display. I understand his desire for this; no sense in burning text into one's plasma TV just to play some MP3s.

??? IMO, there's not even a remote chance of that happening with an AppleTV.

By default, when you play music it'll show the album art on the left and track info on the right. Approximately every 15-20 seconds it flips the two. Then, after about a minute or two, it goes to the "screensaver" which is your photo collection scrolling up the screen (incidentally, this is one of the best features of the device). I think you can turn that screensaver off, but it would still do the flip. I don't see any way that it would cause burn-in. Besides, burn-in isn't the issue it used to be, even on plasmas, and even if it were, 20 seconds of a static image wouldn't be enough to do anything.
_________________________
Matt