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Myth TV + Multiple Video Arcade = Anime for All
x-blackout-x writes "Ian C. Blenke writes "The primary goal of the video keg was to build a reliable video box that was easy to transport with enough space to store 3 days worth of Anime fan-subs.
The secondary goal of the video keg was to make a home PVR system for video playback and time-shifting, along with a video arcade and perhaps a web browser.
The tertiary goal of the video keg was to find an affordable hardware platform so that we could buy 4 of them immmediately to service the primary goal's need for 4 separate video rooms.
For a PVR, the machine neeed to be small, quiet, low-heat, and still fast enough to run the software video player and arcade games."
You can read the full scoop on this project on his blog Ians Blog "
VideoKeg Whitepaper
I wrote this little whitepaper a while back for Amy Zunk to document the function of the VideoKeg/VideoJukebox boxes. Documented here for posterity.
The primary goal of the video keg was to build a reliable video box that was easy to transport with enough space to store 3 days worth of Anime fan-subs.
The secondary goal of the video keg was to make a home PVR system for video playback and time-shifting, along with a video arcade and perhaps a web browser.
The tertiary goal of the video keg was to find an affordable hardware platform so that we could buy 4 of them immmediately to service the primary goal's need for 4 separate video rooms.
For a PVR, the machine neeed to be small, quiet, low-heat, and still fast enough to run the software video player and arcade games.
For portability, we decided to go with a smaller mini-ITX style cube box.
The primary goal suggests redundant drives, but due to the smaller form factor chassis and heat requirements, it was decided that recreating a harddrive should one encounter problems would be a minor task.
Looking at the primary goal, mplayer seemed to suit the need of playing media with a variety of codecs with a minimum of fuss. Easy to script, easy to extend, low overhead, with the ability to normalize audio and clean up dirty videos - mplayer was simply ideal. This lead to the requirement of a ~1Ghz or greater box. The secondary goals would be served as well, though MAME would like a bit more horsepower for some of the more complex emulators.
In the end, we settled on a Chyang Fun Cellbox CF-7989EPIA (1Ghz EPIA-MII 10000) turnkey system with 128M of RAM, a Samsung 160G harddrive, and a DVD-ROM drive.
Once the boxes arrived, the decision at the time was which distribution to pick. If I'm managing more than one server for a given purpose, I like to use debian for package management. If this were a lone PVR box, I would have probably used Gentoo simply for the EPIA community support toward that end.
Starting off with Debian 3.1 Sarge, it was apparent a number of things needed fixing to get it to work with the embedded hardware.
Step 1, find patches and build a kernel.
Kernel patches
After roaming the net for hours, there really seems to be one good source for the latest in EPIA patches: the EPIA wiki:
http://www.epiawiki.org
The site has more of a Gentoo bent, but the patches work on a vanilla kernel just the same under debian.
CPU Optimizations
While building all packages, it seemed important to pay attention to optimizations to squeeze every last cycle out the 1Ghz processor. To that end, the generally recommended C3 Nehemiah CFLAGS are:
If you use gcc 3.3, there is a new arch designation for C3 Nehemiah CPUs:
Some in the commmunity think that the small 64k L1 cache on the C3 processors is causing starvation, and using -Os and not -funroll-loops actually helps performance:
Many others claim the following works best for them:
John
I've been using a modded xbox plus the fantastic xbox media center to play my fansubs for well over a year. It's the only reason I own an xbox. The simplicity of setup (relative,) size, and power is really unmatched. Depending on the encoding, XBMC will even play some HD content.
Yes it's not a PVR, but it gets most of your goals done in about $100-130 and an hour or two.
This was originally a story on Newsforge.com (http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/10/28/1 625258.shtml?tid=132&tid=68&tid=5). It gives the reason why Ian created the video jukebox.
Actually, it's not mod_rewrite at all. This is a Ruby on Rails based engine.
The routes.rb file is quite crazy though.
While the con happens once a year (the boxes are used for other events), MythTV is used to make them useful _the rest of the year_ hooked up to TVs.
That's how MythTV worked its way into this. Not that anyone really cares.
Considering that the project here is run by computer geeks who had to search the net for hours in order to get everything working, what are the odds that this will actually become a consumer device?
As a matter of fact.
Pretty good.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The Tivo can duplicate the Video Kiosk functionality they used in the Video Keg project, but no the scheduling functionality. When you run video rooms at anime conventions, you operate like a TV broadcaster, and need to schedule programs and have filler material for the unused airtime. This project is an intersting way to do this, and I'll have to take a look at it. If it does what it says, it could be a boon to video room organizers.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
From a post on Anime News Network forums:
Having attended several UK conventions over the years, I've seen AEGIS in action and it's pretty polished and reliable. The Mac port is, I'm told, a fairly recent development, and consequently has a few issues... audio starts slightly before video, so there is about a one second delay before you actually start seeing a picture on the screen - it's not out of sync, but it does mean the first second of video gets kind of cut off.
I don't appear to be able to find a website for it though; Googling it only brings up websites related to Gatekeepers or Gundam and even after eliminating those the only related site I could find is the ANN forum post I quoted above.