Introducing The Dave/Dina Multimedia Distro

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 !"

ivtv

[Bigby]

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.

the distro/software is not the hard part.

[Lumpy]

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

A P-4 1.2 ghz machine has barely enough power if you dont have hardware playback for the video files, then you have to get a decent capture card (DVR-250/350 is the ONLY choice.) supported audio that doesnt suck... (SIS/I810/AC97 audio is the absolute worst you can get, and is usually on every motherboard.)

how about a standard hardware platform that works and wont be discontinued in 30 minutes?

Re:I really think..

[Anonymous Coward]

You ever look at the way E-Smith does things? Holly crap, what a mess! It's no wonder there's always exploits for it. And to have to pay for those updates from something that's supposed to be free (based on RH btw) what a joke E-Smith is.

Slightly OT - Video Overlay

[bunco]

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 receivers do this w/ volume display, input selection, etc.

The only devices I've found that do this are "overlay/genlock" devices and cost hundreds of dollars.

TIA

Re:I really think..

[Anonymous Coward]

Our group LEN (Linux Experimental Network) is working on the concept. sorry for no link, but my connection simply would not handle the load, and I won't even be able to use inet here from /. effect.

Right now we have an alpha 'distro' (more of an image with install instruction) for the desktop/multimedia system which is based around kde3.2(beta), 2.6.0 (although i find that test7-8 works much better than 2.6.0 release with identical config still can't figgure out why!) dvd stuff, video conversion, and some other things..

As well, LEN has a router/IDS image (still testing)

www/ftp/bugzilla/mail servers are still not ready but the general image for server install is on its way...

Once again, I appologize for lack of links.

If someone is interested in hosting the images (soon to be knoppix like cds as well) drop me a line at omitsura at yahoo dot com

Happy New Year everyone!
(and merry xmass for those who celebrate it in january)

~omi

TV Listings

[KingDaveRa]

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.

Custom distros for multimedia:

[waferhead]

Like KnoppMyth?

Knoppix with MythTV preconfigured...

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