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Introducing The Dave/Dina Multimedia Distro

Posted by timothy on from the more-the-merrier dept.

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 !"

4 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. ivtv by Bigby · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  2. Slightly OT - Video Overlay by bunco · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

  3. TV Listings by KingDaveRa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 + 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 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.

  4. Custom distros for multimedia: by waferhead · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Like KnoppMyth?

    Knoppix with MythTV preconfigured...

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