Just completed my first trip with AVOD. It's a very nice system. On my return flight the system froze up and and had to be rebooted. What's interesting is that when mine stopped working the one in the seat next to me stopped as well, but the problem was contained to just our two seats. As the system was rebooting, I got to watch it's boot cycle. For the technical people out there, it is a Red Hat Linux based system (didn't notice the kernel version number). There are four hard drives attached to it (don't think these are shared drives). Upon reboot, the system does enter X-Windows for a minute (though the touch screen isn't working during that time period, bummer).

It would be nice if some of the movies were 16:9 instead of 4:3. It looks like the screens might support at least a lower HD resolution, so it would be great to have that as well.

Interesting. Wonder if CO will pay the "microsoft tax" on Linux?

http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/5647

That's 2 years old and so very much not an issue at all. It died shortly after coming up.

And I cannot imagine that they would engineer the system without doing shared drives for storing the media data. If they do that would be a horrible waste of resources, not to mention the extra maintenance costs and time required to update the selections when they do bother to change things.

I have noticed the same, and if you sit in the middle seat you are blessed with an underseat media box taking up 1/3 of your footspace

That is the shared pc unit between the boxes.

Actually there are far better ways to do AVOD than it is being done on planes these days using a central server, that gets updates on near the gates via a wireless(not nessesarily wifi) pushed out in a central fashion, using shared media access.

I could work and design a system much more complete, and reliable that would weigh much less.
I am pretty sure there is some shared storage, I remember in the bootup seeing a NFS mount being done, but locally it had some at least flash storage and all the linux boot was local.

The biggest problem with any kind of an electronic system on board an airplane, is that it needs to not only comply with a host of FAR regulations (e.g. Thou Shalt Not Interfere, and numerous others), but also be certified under those regulations. Having to certify anything per FAR regulations always translates into extraordinarily high development and certification costs, not to mention very long time periods from concept to GA. As a result, most of these systems end up being a generation (or more) behind.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to playing Hangman on my 1990s-vintage, state of the art, individual IFE system.

Every time I fly BF from EWR to HKG I have a problem with the AVOD that will sound crazy, but it happens every time. When I get on the plane it works fine, I have dinner no problems, then I go to sleep and when I wake up, the screen works and I can play music and see menus. However, if I try to play a video (or preview a movie) all I can do is hear sound, but the screen is black with no video. I always have to have the flight attendant reboot the system. I figured I must hit a lot of buttons on the remote when I sleep and this causes it. However, on my last flight, I put the remote in the cutout in the seat to ensure I do not hit buttons when I sleep. Sure enough, I went to sleep, and when I woke up there was a black screen when I try to play videos. Nobody else seems to have this problem and it just drives me crazy because I cannot figure it out. Other than that I love the AVOD.

My biggest annoyance is that during video playback the fast forward/reverse buttons are close to useless. I've been the victim of a system reboot, pressing the wrong button, or simply falling asleep and wanting to go back a few minutes. It is VERY difficult (and time consuming) to go forward or backward any more than a few seconds. Why can't the forward/backwards buttons move a set 30 seconds or 1 minute at a time?

Actually, there is one aspect to the AVOD that is minor, but would like to see addressed:

Can we get movies in the widescreen aspect ratio? I mean, the screen themselves are already 16x9 (or some approximation thereof), and I'd like to see the movies in their full original aspect ratio rather than have the sides cut out and the characters stretched out.

Is it a cost issue? Do 4:3 aspect ratio movies cost less?

You are not alone...I just came back from a roundtrip EWR-HKG in BF and had that problem both ways...try hitting the fast forward or rewind button a couple of times and then hitting play...it worked for me...

Thanks, glad to know I am not going crazy. I will try your suggestion on my next trip scheduled in March.

+1! It's SO annoying to see movies that are introduced as, "Formatted to fit your screen" and that then display with black bars on both sides.

Oh, now this is cool:

According to CO's website, they have all but two ships (012, 008) that have AVOD! Amazing progress, CO. Good job!

Interesting mostly in that appears to be incorrect information. Ships 8, 9, 11 and 12 are all still in the old config. Ship 9 is being refit right now and the other three are flying around.