It’s cool that the Playstation 3 runs Linux. That means it can run all kinds of nice applications 🙂
Category: My Media System
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Nokia 770
I recently bought a Nokia 770 to use as a remote control for MMS (among other things). The first thing one notices is the screen: very clear, big and with great contrast. The built-in IM client is great. It’s excellent for when you’re not near the computer but want to chat with people anyway. It’s quite easy to write on the screen, I’m currently using the virtual keyboard but have also tried the recognition briefly without much succes.
The Opera browser included is very light-weight and quite fast but doesn’t work correctly on all pages, so sometimes one needs to use Minimo (firefox port). Sadly Minimo is a lot more heavy on the system and can cause the system to spontaneously reboot?! I have no clue how a browser can cause the whole system to come crashing down. I thought we cured that when we moved away from Windows 98? 😉
Furthermore the built-in rss reader is quite nice. The font is nice and big which makes it easy to read. I like to read the latest news on the device when I’m eating breakfast in the morning and it saves booting up the computer. The Nokia is ready in seconds.
Before I bought the device, I read in a lot of reviews which claimed that the battery time sucked. That might be true if you’re using it constantly, but if you’re not using it for a little while it will shut down the screen and will wake up in ~1 second again. That way it can easily keep running for quite a few days of rss feed reading and browsing. So you get battery lifetime comparable to a normal phone.
A last thing that I have been using the device for is VOIP. The device has a built-in microphone and speaker so one doesn’t need anything extra to make it work. I would have liked to use my headphones but it appears that for the time being that is not yet supported. By downloading gizmo project software one is able to make very cheap (even free) phone calls to phones in Denmark (and to almost any other part of the world). The sound quality is comparable to Skype.
I havn’t started hacking on it yet but from the brief encounters I have had with the documentation and development enviroment it looks quite nice. To be continued 🙂
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My Media System 1.0.8 released
Mpeg Menu System v2 has changed name to My Media System to better reflect the functionality of the system. The old name was related to the initial goal but which has since been broadened quite a bit. The new release is the fruit of much of the work I did this summer but it also features two very nice additions from outside people. One is a game module so one can play old Nintendo or Amiga games and the other one is the integration of VDR. It’s funny how easy it has been to integrate it all this time and it’s only after someone wrote a patch that I got around to configuring VDR. It’s really a great system and has been perfect for watching NFL on zulu 🙂
My TV crashed (luckily it didn’t burn) so I was looking for alternative solutions and finally found the perfect one. The Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector does 720p HD and is very quiet. Looking around for a modeline for X I found several ones which should work but really doesn’t. I finally found the following one which seems to work rather well:
Modeline “1280×720” 74.400 1280 1728 1768 1984 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync
I’ve watched different kind of content on it from TV, XviD, DVD to HD and it works really well with all. I was a little afraid that XviD ~800kbit would be very blocky but it is actually not a problem. Of course HD just looks amazing.
Joysticks are arriving tomorrow, then it’s old school arcade gaming time 🙂
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Mms used to scam people
Seems mms has been used for the greater good of scamming people into buying some lame links or software package. Mms is used to show how you can get great movies from around the world. Although at the end of the auction it does tell you that the screenshots are not of the real products you will receive 🙂
Link to screenshot (when the auction ends :))
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Rage
So by accident I was looking through Rasterman’s blog and found out that he has been developing a menu system for movie playback using the E17 libraries.
I downloaded the demo movie and was fairly impressed with the nice effects. So off I go to download the thing to evaluate the good and bad things about it. It turns out to be pretty snappy on my machine but also really buggy. It is probably at the same stage bug wise as mms was 2-3 years ago. I think the lesson I learned was that you can do some cool stuff with gstreamer and that using the E17 could be cool, so I’m definitely going to look into that.
Other than that it was a cool tech demo of some of the things E17 is capable of and it that regard it did a fantastic job.
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The future of HTPCs
So I was thinking today about what the future of home theater PC’s and where mmsv2 (or actually the next big version) fits into this.
I’ve come to the conclusion that what is really missing currently is integration. Your HTPC just stores the media and doesn’t really interface with the rest of the world. You don’t want to use your remote control to tag and organize your image collection. You want your HTPC for presentation, sort of like when you do a presentation. It should be slightly more advanced but not much. Instead the advanced jobs should be done on a regular PC and the synced with the HTPC.
This brings up the next question. How do we get there? I think firstly the interface should be designed with this in mind and then for the most used application, such as F-spot, a plugin could be written in that app to synchronize with mms.
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News from 1.1.0 land
So I have been fixing 1.1.0 to try and get rid of enough bug so that people can actually start to test it. Currently I’m fixing the Movie plugin. I found a much better way to integrate movie playback (tv viewing) between mms and mplayer so that will be available soon. What is great about it is the tighter integration (no need to define keys for mplayer specifically, just use the mms ones) and much better performance than what was possible using the old approach (the code in current patch-118). Anyway I’ll publish it soon, it just needs a little more tweaking.
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Great new stuff for the 1.0.7
A lot of nice things has happened in the 1.0.7 branch of mmsv2. A new graphical audio mode has been implemented (screenshots) and today I finally got a chance to look into the kcachegrind tool which I mentioned in an earlier blog post. I found two major sources of performance degration and fixed them. Performance should be a lot better for image heavy stuff (pictures and graphical modes) and for large folders/playlists.
In other news Fredrik Wikström has implemented a plugin so that one can write python scripts for the next big release of mmsv2. This is really one of the coolest things anyone has contributed to mms and I’m really psyched to find out what things people will produce using it.
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mmsv2 coming to EFIKA
Seems my project proposal for porting mmsv2 to the ppc machine EFIKA got approved so they will be sending me one of the machines. Really looking forward to getting this device, it seems like a really nice low-powered computer.