Geek: Installing Freevo

Posted by stephen on Sunday, 25th September, 2005 @ 01:48

Well, it's another Saturday night in, which can only mean one thing... it's time to stay up far too late doing something geeky.

Tonight's challenge... play with Freevo. It seems like a potentially very useful project relating to my current lines of research for work. We're thinking about PC-based set top boxes and interfaces for them.

The two existing STBs we use, an AmiNet110 and a DSL4000 both boot up to basic web browser (Fresco), that provides a Javascript API and extension for controlling video playback, alpha blending, picture-in-graphic, etc.

Upsides... complete integration with media for some really cool stuff.

Downsides... rubbish, limited web browser, lack of visual polish because of simple HTML interface, limited to MPEG1/2 playback, etc.

So, I'm thinking about interfaces. Some kind of Mozilla based thing feels right, but it's really hard to find something off the shelf. MythTV is beautiful, but entirely tailored to be a PVR and isn't that accessible for someone simple like me.

And then there was Freevo. Beautiful, interactive menu system and written in Python! So I can build lots of lovely plugins, etc for our various purposes.

Step one.. get it. So, I'm currently installing Debian on my mini-ITX system. It has no removable media. After a bit of fiddling I've managed to get the installer started from a USB memory stick. Hoorah for standards!

Next step will be installing Freevo from the apt repository and then playing around with it, seeing what it can do for us, etc. After that, shrinking it all down to fit in a 256Mb compact flash. After that, poking around so the compact flash is read only most of the time.

Oh what fun. I suspect tonight won't quite get me to the end of that list though. Lots of playing with Freevo though, hopefully.

Ooh, and there'll be more Wales pictures up soon. Honest.