Premier Farnell, Sony, team up to move Raspberry PI manufacturing to the UK

One of the biggest holdups to owning a Raspberry Pi was its stuttering availability, so much so that it even prompted a few copycat boards. Creator Eben Upton and equipment makers Premier Farnell might have found the solution, teaming up with Sony to produce an initial run of 300,000 of the educational computers at the company's UK Technology Center, in Pencoed, near Bridgend in Wales. Upton hopes to keep the cost at $25 and $35 for two boards, thanks to employing Sony's "lean manufacturing techniques," and the Japanese company has already spent £50,000 ($80,000) on new package-on-package assembly equipment -- ensuring that we'll all be able to get our hands on one soon enough.

[Source: Engadget]

Raspberry Pi lands MPEG-2 and VC-1 decoding through personal licenses, H.264 encoding and CEC tag along

Making the Raspberry Pi affordable involved some tough calls, including the omission of MPEG-2 decoding. Licensing fees alone for the video software would have boosted the board's price by approximately 10 percent. Now, after many have made media centers with the hardware, the foundation behind the project has whipped up a solution to add the missing codec. For $3.16, users can purchase an individual MPEG-2 license for each of their boards on the organization's online store. Partial to Microsoft's VC-1 standard? Rights to using Redmond's codec can be purchased for $1.58. H.264 encoding is also in the cards since OpenMax components needed to develop applications with the functionality are now enabled by default in the device's latest firmware. With CEC support thrown into the Raspbmc, XBian and OpenELEC operating systems, a single IR remote can control a Raspberry Pi, a TV and other connected gadgets. If you're ready to load up your Pi with its newfound abilities, hit the source link below.

Update: The Raspberry Pi Foundation let us know that US customers won't have to pay sales tax, which means patrons will only be set back $3.16 for MPEG-2 and $1.58 for VC-1 support, not $3.79 and $1.90 for the respective licenses. We've updated the post accordingly.

[Source: Engadget]