[gentoo-user] Suggestions for a TV Box

[gentoo-user] Suggestions for a TV Box

[Tom Eastman]

Hey Guys,

I've got a reasonably stripped down gentoo box (P3-733) with a good video
card running in my living room, with the TV as its monitor and a wireless
keyboard and mouse.

Sounds great so far, doesn't it?  But what shall I do with it?  It has good
TV out capability but no TV in.  I have freevo running at the moment, but
not MythTV, I'm not really brave enough yet, it seems pretty complicated to
set up (I have exactly zero MySQL experience).

So, how would you go about getting a good computing experience out of an
older computer with a TV output?  What do people think would make a nice
window manager?  It would be kind of cool to get things like web-browsing
or email up and running.  I'm kind of thinking some kind of non-window
based interface would be cool, like what you see on palm devices and such. 
As well as locking it down to nice big fonts that can be easily read on a
TV screen.

So what do people think?  At the moment its primary function is to grab
movies and stuff off of my NFS and play them throught the TV, but I'm sure
there is potential for it to be so much more!

Inspire me!  ;-)

        Tom


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Re: [gentoo-user] Suggestions for a TV Box

[Andreas Karlsson]

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On Friday 29 July 2005 07.49, Tom Eastman wrote:
> Hey Guys,
>
> I've got a reasonably stripped down gentoo box (P3-733) with a good video
> card running in my living room, with the TV as its monitor and a wireless
> keyboard and mouse.

I am in quite the same situation. I have an AMD 1700+, 1 gig ram, as TV-out. 
As a window manager I´m running xfce 4. It does not eat memory and it worked 
fine with both 256 and 512 meg ram.
As player I´m useing kmplayer with support for both mplayer and xine so I can 
use both engines. Works perfect.
Though I do not have any experience of MythTV, I´ve recon I don´t need it as 
my video card only have TV-out. The only problem I had was the infamous blue 
borders when playing movies in fullscreen, but putting this '/usr/bin/xvattr 
-a XV_COLORKEY -v 66048' in .xinitrc did the trick. First you must emerge 
xvattr.
Oh, and yes ofcurse, it is running Gentoo. :)

Best regards,
Andreas Karlsson

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Re: [gentoo-user] Suggestions for a TV Box

[Luke Albers]

Tom,

This is designed for cell phones and pdas but it might be worth your
time to have a look at
http://www.rasterman.com/files/eem.avi



On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 17:49 +1200, Tom Eastman wrote:
> Hey Guys,
> 
> I've got a reasonably stripped down gentoo box (P3-733) with a good video
> card running in my living room, with the TV as its monitor and a wireless
> keyboard and mouse.
> 
> Sounds great so far, doesn't it?  But what shall I do with it?  It has good
> TV out capability but no TV in.  I have freevo running at the moment, but
> not MythTV, I'm not really brave enough yet, it seems pretty complicated to
> set up (I have exactly zero MySQL experience).
> 
> So, how would you go about getting a good computing experience out of an
> older computer with a TV output?  What do people think would make a nice
> window manager?  It would be kind of cool to get things like web-browsing
> or email up and running.  I'm kind of thinking some kind of non-window
> based interface would be cool, like what you see on palm devices and such. 
> As well as locking it down to nice big fonts that can be easily read on a
> TV screen.
> 
> So what do people think?  At the moment its primary function is to grab
> movies and stuff off of my NFS and play them throught the TV, but I'm sure
> there is potential for it to be so much more!
> 
> Inspire me!  ;-)
> 
>         Tom
> 
> 
-- 
Luke Albers
Electrical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
gtg940r@mail.gatech.edu

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Re: [gentoo-user] Suggestions for a TV Box

[Justin Patrin]

On 7/29/05, Luke Albers <gtg940r@mail.gatech.edu> wrote:
> Tom,
> 
> This is designed for cell phones and pdas but it might be worth your
> time to have a look at
> http://www.rasterman.com/files/eem.avi

Any idea where I can find "eem" sources / information? I see stuff
about E17 being embedded capable, but no actual mentions of "eem".

> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 17:49 +1200, Tom Eastman wrote:
> > Hey Guys,
> >
> > I've got a reasonably stripped down gentoo box (P3-733) with a good video
> > card running in my living room, with the TV as its monitor and a wireless
> > keyboard and mouse.
> >
> > Sounds great so far, doesn't it?  But what shall I do with it?  It has good
> > TV out capability but no TV in.  I have freevo running at the moment, but
> > not MythTV, I'm not really brave enough yet, it seems pretty complicated to
> > set up (I have exactly zero MySQL experience).
> >
> > So, how would you go about getting a good computing experience out of an
> > older computer with a TV output?  What do people think would make a nice
> > window manager?  It would be kind of cool to get things like web-browsing
> > or email up and running.  I'm kind of thinking some kind of non-window
> > based interface would be cool, like what you see on palm devices and such.
> > As well as locking it down to nice big fonts that can be easily read on a
> > TV screen.
> >
> > So what do people think?  At the moment its primary function is to grab
> > movies and stuff off of my NFS and play them throught the TV, but I'm sure
> > there is potential for it to be so much more!
> >
> > Inspire me!  ;-)
> >
> >         Tom
> >
> >
> --
> Luke Albers
> Electrical Engineering
> Georgia Institute of Technology
> gtg940r@mail.gatech.edu
> 
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
> 
> 


-- 
Justin Patrin

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