With the advent of more powerful mobile micro-processors, and the wide offer of codecs that are playable on the Maemo platform (and its openness allows to integrate new ones down the road), an interesting use case would be to be able to use a Maemo device as a Mini Media Center.

A Maemo device as a Mini Media Center should be able to produce at least 720 p video and surround audio; last at least 2 hours while doing so (to allow the viewing of a movie); and interoperate with known media distribution networking protocols. Something nice to have would be to be able to interoperate with external media drives (like DVD drives) through USB and be compatible with remote controls (either Bluetooth or IR).

Many of the elements to make this happen are already present, or can be added in future devices. The idea is to present a consistent mobile media center package, like some other mobile devices are already trying to do with dedicated video hardware and digital outputs.

http://maemo.org/community/brainstor..._media_center/

It also mentions a better way to feed power to Maemo devices: http://maemo.org/community/brainstor..._improvements/

Proposal updated and linked back to this thread.