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Introducing The Dave/Dina Multimedia Distro

Posted by timothy on Wed Dec 31, 2003 04:23 PM
from the more-the-merrier dept.
Media Software Television Entertainment Linux
thomasvs writes "The Dave/Dina project is a small enthusiastic group of developers working on a complete open-sourced distribution for home entertainment systems. You can record and watch TV, watch DVD's, grab and listen to CD's, rate your music, videochat with other people, watch pictures, and all this on your TV set in the living room, with a remote control. The first .iso set has just been released. This is a beta release meant to attract new developers, testers, and hackers, who want to work towards a similar goal. It works fine for us, but it might need fixing on other hardware, which is our next goal. On a related note, Happy New Year to everyone !"
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Introducing The Dave/Dina Multimedia Distro 50 Comments More /

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  • Hmm (Score:4, Informative)

    by downix (84795) on Wednesday December 31 2003, @04:30PM (#7848579) Homepage
    This sounds similar to the VideoLAN [videolan.org] project.

    A great idea tho, tried it out a few years back to much success.
  • For new servers.

    They are down now.

    • Re:davedina.org requesting $20,000 (Score:5, Funny)

      by thomasvs (600635) on Wednesday December 31 2003, @05:04PM (#7848846) Homepage
      sigh, if I had known you people would be actually reading on New Year's eve... you're supposed to be out partying like me damnit ! Anyway, if anyone wants to set me up with an ftp or scp account so I can upload the iso's, let me know ! thomas (at) apestaart (dot) org, I can start uploading right away.
      • Haven't you learned anything on slashdot? Stick them on P2P, and let everyone else share the load.

        It seems that bittorrent is currently /. prefered (but probably only because it's new and trendy). I much prefer smarter P2P (like Gnutella).

        BTW, be prepared to be inundated with thousands of requests by people, asking you to upload them to each of their desktops :-)

  • Top Ten Ways to Kill a Webserver (Score:4, Funny)

    by aztektum (170569) on Wednesday December 31 2003, @04:32PM (#7848594)
    10. Run it on a distro dedicated to multimedia playback and post it on /.

    The rest is up to you
  • This is a beta release meant to attract new developers, testers, and hackers, who want to work towards a similar goal.

    And lawyers and RIAA and MPAA who don't, oh my!

  • So is it easy to setup or a pain in the ass just like so many other products? What kind of TV tuners does it support?
  • That was quick. Did anybody catch a mirror? Or at least get some text so we have something to comment on other than each other?

  • I really think.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NanoGator (522640) on Wednesday December 31 2003, @04:38PM (#7848659) Homepage Journal
    ... that highly specialized distros of Linux like these are going to be what gets it into households. Bonus points of they make it CD bootable like Knoppix.

    Man I'd love to have a mail server distro. Just run the install, then get a little wizard thing that asks the questions it needs to know to be configured, then boom, you have a mail server.

    Make another for web server, office workstation, game distro, artist distro, PDA distro, etc. If focus is given to suit these needs, people will be less shy about trying them out. I know I would be. It's rather daunting to set up Linux, then have NFI what you want to do next, then when you do get an idea it's a PITA to find out what you need to do it.

    • Re:I really think.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by earthforce_1 (454968) <earthforce_1@ya h o o.com> on Wednesday December 31 2003, @05:27PM (#7849017) Journal
      Actually, I would rather see one universal distro that could become whatever you want it to be - anything from a single floppy firewall that runs on a 386, to an everything but the kitchen sink super desktop system, or perhaps one element of a beowulf cluster.

      That is the way the kernel itself is designed - it can be cut down slim and trim or loaded up with all the fixin's. But it is all built off the same code base.

      1000 specialized distros will lead to confusion in the marketplace, and would be a nightmare to keep up to date. Imagine if you have even 10 of them to take care of, and had to remember a few months later how to reinstall or patch if the tools and package management are different for each!

      • Actually, I would rather see one universal distro that could become whatever you want it to be - anything from a single floppy firewall that runs on a 386, to an everything but the kitchen sink super desktop system, or perhaps one element of a beowulf cluster.

        ...the website is here [debian.org]

    • Man I'd love to have a mail server distro. Just run the install, then get a little wizard thing that asks the questions it needs to know to be configured, then boom, you have a mail server.

      That's pretty much exactly what SuSE did with their Openexchange server [suse.com]. Instead of attempting to build a product that works on any Linux distribution, they just attached a purpose-specific Linux distribution to it. You don't install this product on top of your out-of-the-box Linux; you instead boot from the CD and yo
    • Like KnoppMyth?

      Knoppix with MythTV preconfigured...

      Installable, or will boot from CD as a frontend given a network Myth setup.

  • ivtv (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Bigby (659157)
    So does this make ivtv, lirc, etc... much easier to install. I bought a PVR-350 (tv tuner and tv-out) and a 160 GB hd to setup a multimedia center. The server (my primary computer) has the 160 GB hd, MySQL, and master mythtv backend. The client is a 450 MHz computer with the PVR-350. If it works well, I will buy another PVR-350 and put it in an extra 400 MHz computer. Quite scalable. The current problem is getting ivtv to compile properly.
    • Did you yank the firmware information out of the exe file from the windows driver? Ivtv needs that to compile. Also, many of the v4l modules need to be compiled as well.

      Once ivtv is compiled lirc is pretty easy to get working with the hauppague remote. Be sure to do a make clean in the lirc directory if you've had failed compiles of it, though.

      But I do know for a fact the PVR-250's do work, once ivtv is up and going and loaded (theres also some issues with setup of your /etc/modules.conf to get things
  • Hey, anyone have a .torrent for this?

  • Advice to distro nerds. (Score:3, Funny)

    by supabeast! (84658) on Wednesday December 31 2003, @04:45PM (#7848714)
    In the future, when you get /. to pump your new distro, make sure that your servers can handle the load first.

    Morons.
  • This sounds totally cool! Maybe I should build a box for this and give it to the folks next year for christmas.

    On a related note, Happy New Year to everyone !

    thanks! but how is that anywhere near related?!

  • Sure, content makers never want to let their works go for free.

    So charge people for the download. Allow access to every movie, book, piece of culture you can put in the database.

    Allow people to comment on it and categorize similar works. Ie, if you liked the Lion King, maybe watch some other Disney movies.

    But take it to obscure works, and you get to learn more about culture.

    For kids, it would be invaluable for learning... Theres so many learning software packages for kids, edutainment, but they go obs
    • How about something like the WWW, but you pay for a subscription? For all Americans who want to get OnLine. Where's my venture capital for this bold new idea?
      • Theres a great wealth of culture that the web doesn't have listed and referenced.

        Instead of camping out television, you could actively pick any show you wanted to watch.

        Don't pay cable or satellite bills, and the computer is the center of your entertainment system. Pay an internet bill instead.

        The shows you want to watch would be easier to access. It didn't matter in the past, where there weren't many television shows/movies, and people would could see them all.

        Now, someone may want to sitdown and wat
        • You're right. Help me lobby the government to create neighborhood storefronts which keep copies of thousands of books, fiction, nonfiction, reference. People could register to borrow the books, provided they return them in a short time. We could get local schools to do it too, I'm sure colleges will go crazy for this. If we get rolling now, I'm sure that we'll have nice, quiet places that people can go to read within the next 5-10 years. I even envision some of the more secretly repressed cute girls will wa
          • There will be corporatization of online media, its happening already.

            Once corporatization takes hold, there will be crackdowns on Kazaaalikes.

            The penalties for downloading will be more pricing than the cost of the download.

            This means the over all price of media will drop too, and the masses will adopt it.

            One cablebox/computer, that plugs into your TV. Allows you to watch any movie or television show ever made.

            This is what the future holds. If its a good box, or a bad box is up to the creator of it.

            T

  • Try this one out... (Score:5, Informative)

    by tbaggy (151760) on Wednesday December 31 2003, @05:33PM (#7849052)
    Try out KnoppMyth [mysettopbox.tv] which is a Knoppix [knoppix.org] bootable CD customized to do just MythTV [mythtv.org]
  • I've been considering a client/server solution which places a low power (fanless) client PC near your home theater. This client would do things like announce incoming calls (vgetty), news, etc. The client would also be able to serve audio and possibly video content from the server.

    Anyway.. for this to work effectively, I'd need a means to overlay graphics on the existing video signal to my TV/monitor. Does anyone know of an inexpensive means of doing this? Maintaining video quality is key. Many audio

  • A Google Search (dina tersago belgium [google.com]) on a supermodel babe yields as it's first result [davedina.org], not a bunch of spam/pron sites, but a new Linux project [sourceforge.net] ? WTF ? hehehe...
    • Actually, they 'Dina' comes from Dina Tersago. A Computer Science student that becomes miss belgium is not something you see everyday :)
      I know about this stuff, because I was one of the first that heared the name of the project years ago from Thomas.

      Anyway, time are gone.. memories..
  • Great. Now I can have many more hours and channels of TV I don't want to watch.

  • TV Listings (Score:4, Interesting)

    by KingDaveRa (620784) on Wednesday December 31 2003, @06:27PM (#7849491) Homepage
    These projects fail in the PVR stakes, at least for me, in that they don't have consistant, reliable sources of TV listings. Even if they do, they're often US-based. WebTV (remember that?!) and so on don't really work properly due to the fact they aren't supported worldwide. Unless you're going to pay somebody to provide your listings, they are probably going to just dry up. In Sky + [sky.com] I've got a reliable, if closed-source solution. But the developers are proactive and working on it, so its not all bad. For a project like this to be totally successful as a PVR it needs either a community willing to edit these listings (some are available anyway for free) or another method, like using DigiGuide [digiguide.co.uk] or a similar system. Some of the PC-TV cards out there like the Black Gold use DigiGuide for PVR features. Trouble is, its currently Windows only.
  • Will the distro support de100c (also de200c's) that were discontinued and fire-saled by HP about a year ago?

    These are cool units that look like a consumer "stackable" A/V unit, have video out, IR with remote control, networking, internal hard disk, etc. They were intended for storing digital audio, but enterprising folks have tried running Linux video apps.

    How would this distro fare?

    see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/de100c for more info.
    • Yes, but all that shit you mentioned cost mad amount of monies. You can build a PC for under $500 and with free software, have it equal an expensive PVR + dvd player. Oh, and watch all those divx movies that you 'backed up'.
        • The Hauppage WinTV PVR 250 (and 350) for that matter, both work on Linux. They encode TV signal to mpeg.

          MythTv is required if you want to flag commercials, cut them out, and reincode.

          It will transcode your output automatically to another format for you, but to cut out the commercials, you have to manually check/modify the automatically created flags, but that's just because no commercial flagging is perfect (though for some channels, myth's is damn close.

    • Of course we can install all this software ourselves. But my mother can't.
      The reason for using any Linux distribution is to have a maximum of useful and well configured software with minimum efforts.

      My Red Hat 9, before I had done manual installations of many extra software or newer or different versions, couldn't play neither mp3s, mpgs, avis, nor movs.

      We can do all this with any distribution just like we can program a complete database system in assembler, or we can have a perfectly secure network if

      • If you actually go out and buy a CD then you get 2-3 good tracks, 4-5 filler, and 2-3 complete turds. It's nice to be able to punch the "Oh, yuck!" button, then go back later and clean out the yuck.

        I haven't bought a new CD in a long time but I have been converting a lot of old CDs to MP3.
    • just a HUNCH but I'd fathom a guess that this link isn't particularly relevant, or work safe. I don't know since I'm at work, and I value my job and my eyes. Follow with caution.
    • I don't know what kind of crack your smokin, but I can get my measily 500mhz P3 to playback any video file, mpeg or avi, xvid, quicktime, etc...

      Even better, get a DXR3 for $30 on ebay. Mplayer and Xine both can use its TV out. And yes, it even does non-mpeg files on the TV-out and yes that same computer plays it back just fine.

        • Nvidia has crap for video out.

          I don't know how many centuries ago you used an NVidia card for video-out (or if you're just BSing) but my Geforce4 MX card's video-out is significantly better quality than even moderately-priced DVD-players. I'd be willing to bet it's better than high-priced DVD-players as well, but I don't own one, so I can't say that with any certainty.

          why dont you actually try to make one of these things instead of talking out your ass..

          I can't speak for the poster, but I have built a

          • Hey, thanks man. Its a new year and this, uh, person is flaming for something he can't comprehend. Have a good year evilviper!!!

            BTW, I can guarantee its better because my laptop IS my DVD player. Video out works great. And yes, in Theater mode in Linux, so my sister can watch Finding Nemo on the TV while I read /. on the laptop wireless....

            Why do I need winblows again?

        • Hey donkey ball licker...

          NVIDIA has awesome video output. And, why don't you guys get out of the all in one video shit for a $20 PCI card that will do XV? Come on you get what you pay for. SIS, funk dat.

          The original post was about TV output and Linux.

          Yeah, RTFA biatch, I said you can get a DXR3 on ebay for roughly what you pay for 'net access to bitch ass out.

          The world doesn't have windows does it?

    • The hard part is getting TV out that is clean, supported and Hardware accelerated for mpeg1/2/4 playback.

      Just yesterday I posted an informal announcement that MPlayer has hardware MPEG1/2 acceleration (primarily) on Geforce4 videocards (there's some talk about hardware-assisted MPEG4, but I'm not holding my breath). The Geforce4 cards also happen to commonly have SVideo outputs.

      A P-4 1.2 ghz machine has barely enough power if you dont have hardware playback for the video files

      What the hell? I've hear

    • That's so nice I mirrored it [pointclark.net]! But 800+Megs seems a bit much for a PVR system. In case you can't see the pic, it's a shot of the install screen with a pic of Dina Tersago, listed as the source of inspiration and a Miss Belgium.

      Jonah Hex
        • Because now my personal website will show up in Slashdot and Google searches, thereby linking my nefarious post history to my real-world identity.
    • http://slashdot.org/~Compact%20Dick/fans you are not totally alone ;-)

      I just added myself, drop any of your fans a line and have a chat, it can stay anonymous if you want.

      it's normal to have these kinds of feelings more at this time of year there is a lot of help out there and like you I seem to have karma to burn so fuck those mods who mod down anything that doesn't fit their personal preferences. fuck em they can't hurt you.

      you seem to be a together guy in your earlier posts and might be suffering a li

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