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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 !"
This idea is like Windows XP Media Center Edition. Free software for everything you could possibly want in a Home Multimedia Center.
But ya'know, not at all gay like WinXP MCE
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
Damn... :)
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
This sounds similar to the VideoLAN project.
A great idea tho, tried it out a few years back to much success.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
For new servers.
They are down now.
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'.
10. Run it on a distro dedicated to multimedia playback and post it on /.
The rest is up to you
No sig for you!!
And lawyers and RIAA and MPAA who don't, oh my!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Oh well, should have started my ftp download a second sooner...
Anyone doing this already with satisfactory results? I'm loving Tivo but am very close to trying out the all in one option.
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?
"Rate your music" is a particularly stupid reason for media PC.
If I have the song, THAT's the good rating. The fact that I went out & got it. What kind of moron goes out to get music they don't like?
well good luck with the project in the new year. i think these distro's are good idea. something i would like to setup in my flat. but lack the spare hardware for now. Hope for the future.
Your only young once, but you can be imature forever.
Why?
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?
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.
See you, space cowboy...
Please name one TV-capture card that captures and packs video into DivX using free software.
I have an el-cheapo card that does that perfectly in Windows, but under Linux (xawtv) it can hardly capture raw input (which I have to compress later manually).
The owls are not what they seem
MOD PARENT DOWN!!!!
... 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.
"Derp de derp."
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 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?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hey, anyone have a .torrent for this?
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 we don't let default settings on OSes, etc.
Being able to do something is one thing, but being able to do this easily is another one.
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?!
no thanks
PLEASE! Like your mom can even connect this thing to the tv, or piece it together in the first place.
Some people just expect way too much of their parents. I bet her vcr is flashing 12:00 right this minute.
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 obscure with each passing computer phase.
This would make your computer not only replace your television, but be enlightening too.
God spoke to me
The project has a sourceforge page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/davedina.
No files there, but the CVS is being used and you can get to the web CVS archive to look around via http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/davedina
Sure there are software tools out there to do all the tasks listed, but are they easy to use fullscreen with a remote? Easy configuration is important, but I hope that this distribution does more than just bundle some destop-based apps.
Try out KnoppMyth which is a Knoppix bootable CD customized to do just MythTV
do we really need another one?
Yeah, but you can always set it up for her, just like you usually have to set the VCR up for her. Then she can (usually) figure out how to put in tapes and play them herself.
And besides, my mom aside, I would like something like this just for the convenience factor. I mean sure, I could do it all myself, but it would take absolutely ages and I would have to do a lot of reading to learn how. I think this distro's a great idea because it provides a good starting point for anyone.
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
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 little at the moment but don't have to be alone. Drop someone a line and try and talk to them. it could be as simple as someone on slashdot or the samaratans or someone who you look up to.
if you a troll you took a long time to change your spots
blog and junk
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.
Maybe it's related because the system has gone up like a firecracker?
Ron Paul 2012
You're exactly right.
My entire family has figured out how to run the Myth box. Though none of them could set it up.
Does this mean that Dave/Dina's distro will be called Diva perhaps?
python >>>
reduce(lambda x,y:x+y,map(lambda x:chr(ord(x)^42),tuple('zS^BED\nX_FOY\x0b')))
A Google Search (dina tersago belgium) on a supermodel babe yields as it's first result, not a bunch of spam/pron sites, but a new Linux project ? WTF ? hehehe...
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
Please name one TV-capture card that captures and packs video into DivX using free software. I use a cheapo Hauppauge WinTV dbx/stereo card (model 401) and it works just fine. MythTV captures video from it and encodes it straight to DivX format to save it on the hard drive. Actually, my Athlon 2400+ easily captures a 480x480 input stream at 2200kbps from both my WinTV cards, encodes them in real time, and lets me watch one while also encoding. As long as you've got a 1GHz PIII or better you shouldn't have a problem encoding to DivX in realtime.
Great. Now I can have many more hours and channels of TV I don't want to watch.
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.
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 watch a whole season of the Simpsons. Captain obvious will note, Kazaa already does this, but thats the point. There is a monopolistic demand for a cental site to hold information. Once media providers realize they could make more money off such a setup, they'd probably go for it.
Its like Blockbuster, but you don't have to leave your house. Now, the key is, that since its going to be a monopoly, once its in place, its going to be a monster. Now it can either be a good monster, like Puff the Magic Dragon, or a bad monster, like MTV. If its done benevolently, then you'll have it also educating our kids. But if its done corporately, it'll be trying to make our kids dumb enough to want more pairs of jeans than they need.
The key is, from the beginning of time, libraries have been man's dream of educating the world. They're a place of learning, and people with freedom to access them can benefit. One book can help more than one person. The internet lets people access that book without the limitations of traveling, or a publisher making copies of the book.
I'd want to get involved in such a project just to make sure the aim would be a positive change. There's no arguing this will be a success, because it will definately happen within the next 5-10 years. The question that is at hand is whether our kids will become more educated, or will they be subjected to corporate mind games. Movies, television, and video games are easy to watch. They can be used as tools to get kids motivated to want to learn and achieve.
Imagine a generation who thinks learning is fun and cool. Educated people are less likely to be self centered and caught up in the dog eat dog world. Educated people are the ones that cure diseases and make real positive change. I could go on and on, but I definately see an interest in participating strongly in this project if I was allowed. It has a far reaching impact.
God spoke to me
Like KnoppMyth?
Knoppix with MythTV preconfigured...
Installable, or will boot from CD as a frontend given a network Myth setup.
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 want to staff them, keeping their hair pinned up, and ugly eyeglasses on, starring in the fantasies of geeks everywhere.
--
make install -not war
Will the mascot be a pink dinosaur humping the leg of a cartoon version of Ralph Cramden?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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.
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.
This is one, if you're in it for the money, you're doing evil.
God spoke to me
I'm having trouble laughing at stuff anymore when theres an opprotunity present to make the world a better place.
Laughing at something is just shugging it off, like its satire, and something that's going to go on regardless.
To me, its hard to joke about something so gravely serious, and difficult to understand.
With children being influenced by school, parents, and the media, its tough to lay blame anywhere.
This system will be a one of the largest influences on children for the future.
God spoke to me