>>Still, I think if Alpine or Pioneer created an in-car mp3 player,
>>it'll be proprietary anyway (looks like the Aiwa is)...

>Everything from the big companies I've seen advertised for this year
>are all CDR-based or memory-card based. The CDR versions are definitely
>not proprietary

Actually, what I meant by proprietary was the interface and stuff. Like for instance, Alpine's AiBus thingy. A nice thing about empeg is that is uses Linux, a widely known and used OS that is very open. If Alpine made a similar product, they'd probably keep the whole thing closed and create their own proprietary O/S.

I guess the reason why I mentioned it was, I originally wanted to build a machine that played mpgs and toss it in the trunk (as others do). But I was hoping to create an interface that could connect to an existing head unit. The specs to Alpine's head units (eg AiBus) is not available to the public (at least, not that I could find)... so I gave up.

Although it may not have been one of the design goals, empeg give people the ability to make their empeg players more powerful than what you get out of the box.