Since this is 500th post in this thread I thought I'd make it a little longer one. This may sound like a rant or ramble so I'm sorry in advance

First of all, I'm pretty amazed of the interest for Knots. I never announced it for N900, the name is next to impossible to google, this thread is in multimedia section where threads come to die and it hasn't been the smoothest drive for some of the Windows Vista/7 users and still it has most replies (due to those problems I know ) in this section so thank you!

Knots was mainly written for the older Maemo devices because they didn't have too much juice for video playback. At the last Maemo summit nobody even knew the app and those who did said it's not needed for N900 anymore. And maybe they were right, guess the upnp streaming bug in the latest firmware has something to do with the recent activity. I didn't even mean to port it to N900 if it wasn't for qwerty12, who insisted that I do. And he never really used it so I guess he was just being evil

Knots has been my pet project for like 3 years. First version was a quick hack with lots of features and it had very few users, mainly just people who used VDR. I wasn't too happy with it so I started rewriting it.

And here we are again, little less unhappy with it, but not that pleased either. It has been a lot of work getting it to run on most operating systems and writing server/client software with many different user interfaces/clients and support for devices/software I haven't even seen or used doesn't happen overnight. And since I haven't been able to attract any developers nor testers, many corners needed to be cut and I went with release early, release often approach with quick fixes and hacks. It turned out pretty well in the end, but the pay has been terrible I've been dreaming of rewriting most parts and make it more robust to add new features, but I soon realize the amount of work it involves and forget about it. It is what it is now.

The main reason for this message (I guess) is the fact that I need to give my N900 back to Nokia. I would have gotten the developer discount, but the idea of one week warranty didn't really excite me. It was a very generous offer from Nokia and I am really thankful for it. But it also means I can't really work on Knots for N900 anymore. And to prevent the current version from not working, I'm not going to work on the server nor diablo version anymore either. I pushed a new version to -devel today for the N900 and it will probably be the last one. Hopefully it will bring some joy to someone and I hope new VLC releases don't break it too soon.

Since I've no idea how many people actually use Knots I can't really ask Nokia to let me keep the device when they can't take advantage of my software. And I can't really push it to extras either because I don't know how that should be handled since testing Knots involves testing the server. And since there are so many different kind of computers out there I can't really make it idiot proof.

So thank you all for reporting bugs, requesting features and for the positive feedback. I still think Knots has some good ideas in it so hopefully someday someone will perfect it and create a simple to use app that allows you to watch your media everywhere no matter what the device or bandwidth is. MeeGo and Qt sound perfect for that.