Hey all, was just thinking of a new project which I figured could be useful (at least to myself).
Is it possible to take a USB or an external hard drive, loaded with say… 4 movies on it… plug the USB/HD into the Gadget, then plug output video/audio wires to a TV, so that this Gadget could play the movies from the USB/HD onto the TV?
what is the gadget?
Assuming you mean Gadgeteer mainboard… short answer is no.
I think the gadget is his device he’s wanting to put together.
Could he use these to build a gadget to play videos?
It would be similar to what WouterH did (but he did it with SD and ASM).
Granted the video would need to be preformatted for 5:6:5 and his stream of bitmaps - also the video output would be a very limited resolution.
Excuse my inprecision,
mhectorgato Yes, that is exactly what I’m talking about, doesn’t sound like an optimal solution though 
That is correct. These boards don’t have enough processing power to do HD video easily. You might want to try a Raspberry Pi.
even a rasp doesn’t have enough processing power. It’s good in rendering shaders but that’s about it. Look for nvidea tegra2 or tegra3.
You need something with dedicated decoding hardware. There are apparently FPGA designs that can do it, but they are likely all commercial and expensive. The Raspberry Pi has H.264 (and now, VC-1 and MPEG-2 if you purchase the licenses) hardware decoding built in.
The Raspberry Pi is exactly what you want. One of these FEZ boards couldn’t move enough data to an FPGA anyway without RLP to accomplish what you want.