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Linux DVD Player on a Bootable CD?
Kumar asks: "I'm
trying to make a bootable Linux CD with nothing more than XFree86 4
and ogle to play
DVDs. I'm trying to make it as simple as possible: boot the system,
change the CD, hit 'play'. If anyone has attempted anything like this
before I'd like to hear of their successes and/or any tips on
achieving this goal." A Linux box set up like this might make a
nice alternative to an expensive DVD player. Is anyone working on
something like this?
Check out demolinux.org. I was going to come up with a similar concept myself. I just wanted to have a portable linux system with some X Window capabilities to use on other people's computers and at work without having to muck with formatting other peoples hard drives. Though a boot floppy could give me a really basic linux system I wanted something with more tools. I came across the demolinux site in search of trying to see if anyone else had already come up with the concept. The demolinux site also has some links to pages that explain in a really rough and incomplete way how to go about building a live file system on a cdrom. I tried out the demolinux and of course it is really slow and pretty much unusable with only 64 megs of ram which is all I have on my test machine that I tested it on. But it does run and load on even just 64 megs of ram. The iso that I downloaded and burned onto a cdrom from the demolinux site runs a full version of KDE right off the cdrom. So you could literally run an entire linux system without the need for a hard drive! But of course for it to be practical you would need RAM coming out your arse to make it work well. But it's definitely doable. Basically to accomplish the DVD idea you would just use the same concepts that demolinux used to create their distro and strip it down and just add the bare essentials with of course DVD apps loaded. Hope this helps you out!
I am trying to build a similar Linux system. However, I would like to be able to play DVDs in my TV. I would like also to plug my satellite receiver in the system to use it as a TiVO like solution. The problem is that I am not able to find a video card with TV-Out supported on Linux. A large numbers of cards supported on Linux have TV output but this feature is not supported on Linux. The task becomes even harder if you try to find a card that has TV output and input support on Linux. I haven't started to look for software that would implement the TiVO solution yet but I've heard of a few projects like OpenPVR etc. Would any one of you guys know of good video cards and software that I could use in a solution like this? Have you guys tried to do the same? Any help would be appreciated.