We've gotten pretty far off on a tangent here, and I think it may be appropriate to pause and reconsider where we are.

First, I don't think the Roku products are a good benchmark for what we should expect from a surround processor's "customizability" - it is a niche product whose central information source is a network connection to a PC, whereas a surround processor like the 990 is a focal point for mass-market analog and digital audio and video signals. There is a very different host of issues and concerns to deal with.

Second, the Model 990 is a product that was designed in what we might call the "classical" sense for a modern surround sound processor. That design does include a method for updating firmware (in the 990's case, there are two parallel methods: USB and serial). It was never intended to easily support wholesale changes like add-on daughter boards for things such as the HDMI/DVI transcoding (and I think the real issue is that component isn't transcoded to DVI, not the other way around - although either proposition comes with a not-insignificant price tag attached). Can changes like that be made? Sure - but it would cost less to just replace the 990 with a new model that was designed from the ground up with those capabilities or to have a separate component with those features. I think there are some ideas being tossed out here that could be great to implement on a product, but that are physically or financially impractical for an existing product like the 990. It might be beneficial for Outlaw to start evaluating the options for the sort of "open platform" processor that Rene is suggesting, but tying that to the 990 seems painfully difficult if not impossible.