I'm having trouble affording a Squeezebox, I can't even pretend this is possible.

Tho, I really like the idea of there being controls on the device.

The last time I tried the SlimServer I wasn't exactly blown away by it. The web interface was ugly as hell. Once Songbird starts to stablize, I think it and the SlimServer could make a interesting pair. Songbird making a nice (humane) frontend for SlimServer.

The second video "is no longer available", and I can't hear him over the music in the last video.

This is really impressive. A PC is a hostile environment for a sound card, which rules out a Mac Mini or HTPC for serious listening. There are dedicated media servers with audiophile pretensions but I don't want to hear a hard drive whirring away, and you feel stupid a few years after paying $4000 for a music server with a mighty 80GB of storage.

Instead, buy Slim devices and put your music on a cheap network drive in the garage. Their SlimServer software is open source and hence is available for hacked versions of most network drives.

I'm a huge fan of the Squeezebox (I own two!) and the Transporter looks damn sweet. But it's hard to imagine plunking down $2k for one of these bad boys.

My question is, for that much money, why didn't they include the ability to do video streaming?

Note all the features (software, nav, visual, and remote) are standard on the regular Squeezebox too. Of course the physical hardware is beefed up, and I find myself saying, "Hey, nice knob!"

Sadly my original squeezebox can't be software upgraded to the new features.

i love it that in the first video, it had 2 "left hand screen"s