Build your own Google TV using Raspberry Pi, Node.js and Socket.io
blog.donaldderek.com
blog.donaldderek.com
What would be the legality of distributing that script? (depending on legality, I may or may not write or have already written such a script)
See also (with varying degrees of effectiveness), Headphones (music), Mylar (comics), and CouchPotato (movies)
https://github.com/mikew/ss-raspberry Extracted from http://mikew.github.io/ss-plex.bundle/
As others are saying, it's still a good hack though. And while just installing a custom distro meant for XBMC on your rpi might be easier, putting something like this together by hand is a much better experience.
I do appreciate the "hackerness" attempt of the article though, it goes to show why the Pi is so cool.
Luckily my TV works well with libCEC, so I don't need my phone/tablet every time.
BUT god this is a nice hacking project and i would love to see this being the start of an XBMC alternative open source project that is built upon web technology! Awesome!
The project is run by a student here in London, ON Canada.
Looking up his blog made that pretty apparent .co.uk :P
I've been running a custom mp3 media server[1] built around a similar stack (node,socket.io,express) and I was surprised how capable the pi is for this kind of thing. The only real slowdown I saw in my project was inserting/reading thousands of records from a sqlite3 db (displaying all tracks for example) and even that was solved pretty easily with some caching. My project is all running headless though, with presentation handled on the client (phone/desktop browser); I'd be curious how the chromium render speeds are for this. In my testing any kind of web browsing on the pi was pretty painful.
[1]: https://github.com/badfortrains/wupnp my much more poorly documented raspberry pi project
Have a DVR-like interface, where all content is combined. This means downloaded torrents (by new and/or watched), with meta info. Also include new streams from HuluFlix based on when they were made available. New shows recorded from antenna and maybe QAM. New movies from Crackle, etc. The point is, I should be able to tell the application that I want all new episodes of "The Simpsons" and it will use all available configured sources to find what I want. It will present this to me in one comprehensive list. The source is irrelevant and I don't want to start various apps to find what I want. Google TV sort of tried to do this and failed. As cool as XBMC and their ilk are, they suffer from not passing the "wife test" and feature bloat. This thing, in my mind, should be dead simple to use.
Boxee also did a great job of combining sources and did a good job with local storage. It also didn't support DVR.
To be honest DVR is an animal that I've seen nobody crack successfully.
Also, most (all?) Roku's support local storage, but it isn't ideal. Usually, I need to throw some content on a thumbdrive and stick it into the Roku. Not horrible, but I wish I could use the Roku to download content to use it to stream via DLNA.
Also, when I last tried to use Plex (though, this was more than a year ago), it was extremely clunky. Maybe things are different now, or maybe I was expecting it to behave differently, but I didnt like it.
In fact the very reason I switched away from Boxee and Moovida back to vanilla XBMC was because I wanted a media player that separated my music and videos and respected my file system hierarchy.
However looking at the screenshots for this project, it looks like it separates music and video in the same way XBMC does. So I'm not really sure I understand your point.
What you're describing isn't really a feature I personally want (just having random YouTube results mixed in with offline content would annoy me), however I can totally understand why it would be preferable for many other people.
> Furthermore, a good application would keep tabs on release date and watched status for me, like you'd expect from a DVR.
To be fair, XBMC does do that.
$120 at Adafruit. Would you give that?
It's a very cool project for the technically savvy, but if you sell it to consumers, you'd have to provide support, something that could be time consuming. Or make it foolproof (Apple's strength).
I have a Raspbmc setup, and I get a fair amount of interest from visitors who are impressed, and want their own cheap media centers. I dissuade them, unless I am sure they can troubleshoot computer issues, SSH/SFTP, image an SD card, and know basic SQL.
What i learned from my previous media center (a Boxee, so basically a commercial XBMC fork): To stream FullHD over Wifi use NFS, not SMB, it is a difference. Atleast in my setup movies wouldn't play without buffering every few seconds over SMB.
Edit: also, from my experience openelec seems to be a little bit faster. Maybe because it's not booting the whole Debian userspace but only a minimal Linux.
Also: You can overclock your rPi without losing warranty (within limits). I overclocked mine to the maximum (700MHz -> 1000MHz) and it's still running without any cooling! :)
Dell is supposedly going to be the first one on the scene with a real brand-named "mini-PC" device.