Ask Slashdot: How To Make My Own Hardware Multimedia Player?

An anonymous reader writes "I was looking at multimedia players from brands such as SumVision, Noontec and Western Digital. They all seem to be some device which accepts a USB hard-drive and commands from an IR remote control, and throws the result over HDMI. I have my own idea of what a hardware multimedia player should do (e.g. a personalized library screen for episodes, movies and documentaries; resume play; loudness control; etc.). I also think it will a good programming adventure because I will have to make the player compatible with more than a few popular codecs. Is this an FPGA arena? Or a mini-linux tv-box? Any advice, books or starting point to suggest?" There certainly have been a lot of products and projects in this domain over the years, but what's the best place to start in the year 2012?

Comments

The easy way

[Anonymous Coward]

XBMC

Re:The easy way

[NFN_NLN]

This story only has 2 comments right now. One recommending XBMC and another recommending RaspberryPi.
Correct on both counts. I don't think you need to reinvent the wheel on this...

Also, "USB hard-drive"? Do you really want to transfer media to a drive? Build a home NAS and stream everything to the media player. The media player should be small and quiet. There is no need for an HDD.

Re:The easy way

[Keruo]

XBMC

Combine this with AppleTV, it's only $99, and you have somewhat sane system.
It comes with remote already so one less extra step to tinker on.

Your question is about media and entertainment. Are you entertained by tinkering stuff or consuming entertainment generated by others?

Re:The easy way

[spire3661]

Even with the best of tools and setups, pure streaming is not always an option. My synology NAS barfs on .mp4s sometimes. Flat out, dont use DLNA, it sucks, it has always sucked, it will always suck. Streaming is great, but it still not a universal thing that always works unless you very tightly control the media you feed into the system. You got things like the netatalk devs playing games, Apple messing around, its still complicated. LOVE my synology NAS, but DLNA sucks donkey dick. Im typing this as im waiting for handbrake to finish another pass trying to find the optimal format/size for xbox, android (nook color, hrdwre lmtd) and iOS.

Re:The easy way

[grantek]

Even with the best of tools and setups, pure streaming is not always an option. My synology NAS barfs on .mp4s sometimes.

Your NAS doing DLNA is doing more than a NAS needs to. XBMC happily supports connecting to Samba or SFTP shares within the application, or you could just use NFS and attach the NAS share to the local filesystem. If a NAS cares about what type of file it's sending over a plain filesystem access protocol like that it's a broken NAS.

Re:The easy way

[jedidiah]

Nothing beats a PC for versatility and flexibility. It's a device in control of the end users. People who build HTPC software are also people that use HTPC software. This reflects in the gap between appliances and PC software.

Even if you use a modern ARM appliance, chances are that you will need a big fat noisy power hungry PC in order to smooth over the limitation of the appliance. Chances are that you will be running some user developed software on the appliance as well.

There's a good reason that everyone says XBMC.

Re:The easy way

[hairyfeet]

Even better answer...don't. Seriously the power draw of anything he can cook up (unless he builds his own raspberry Pi based unit) will be nuts compared to the already built. I've had plenty of happy customers with the Nbox and Nbox HD, both are simple enough your average 6 year old can use them and its $25 for the Nbox and $60 for the Nbox HD. The only thing you need to know is use an external drive with its own PSU as the nbox doesn't put enough power over USB to drive laptop drives. But they are cheap, easy to use, VERY low power, and have both USB and SD slots which is great for when i want to take a movie over to watch with my dad as i can just slap it on an SD and drop it in my pocket.

Now if you want to go HTPC well there has never been a better time as tiger has been selling AMD kits crazy cheap on account of the impending socket change. You can get a fully loaded triple for like $220 bucks right now and the AMD IGP supports just about every time of codec you can name.

If you want even cheaper there are several kits at newegg based on the Brazos platform which gives you a dual core APU that has 2 bobcat cores and an AMD HD6320 GPU. The Brazos platform is great, in fact i liked it enough i sold my laptop for a EEE netbook and just love it. I've also built several HTPCs out of Brazos and its just a great little unit. If you want to go Linux its been supported OOTB since Ubuntu 10.04 so no worries, i'm pretty sure the XBMC Linux build supports it as well. And of course if you want to go Win 7 it has full support for DXVA and can even play some older games like L4D and Crysis with the graphics lowered.

So if all you are wanting is a video player just get a prebuilt like Nbox HD unless you want to build a pi based, or if you want a full fledged HTPC look at the Brazos followed by one of the Athlon kits, just depending on how much power and money you are willing to spend. Brazos is only 18w so its the lowest powered HTPC i know of but with a little underclocking and a good board with the ability to turn off phases you can get an Athlon down to sub 50w.

Re:The easy way

[PNutts]

DLNA sucks donkey dick.

Hey, slow down. We're talking about building it, not what we're going to watch on it. But since you brought it up is it available on Blu -ray?

Re:The easy way

[Miamicanes]

Exactly. If you want to build a 100% open-source media player capable of handling just about anything you might throw at it, you're almost certainly going to have to go with x64 architecture and forget about ARM. ARM just isn't fast enough to bitbang stuff like h.264 HD encoding in realtime, and will probably struggle to do 1080p60 playback (if it can do it at all). Everything that's ARM-based depends upon hardware acceleration and custom chips you'll probably never be allowed to buy or get low-level documentation for. At least, not documentation to do the kind of stuff you're likely to want to do. Most ARM-based media players huff and puff just trying to deal with their own UIs, even when they're treating the actual media playback like an opaque black box that takes encrypted input and (hopefully) does something useful with it.

Buy a motherboard & CPU that's fast enough to decode 1080p60 to RGB and triple-buffer it in realtime, and fast enough to do realtime 720p60 & 1080i60 mpeg-2 encoding without breaking a sweat. Pair it with a few 7200RPM drives with SSD write-through cache. And whatever you do, don't put yourself in a position where you depend upon any kind of hardware codec or acceleration that lacks 100% open-source Linux drivers based upon official datasheets (reverse-engineered drivers don't count). You can always through a bigger CPU at the problem and fix things yourself with software, but you can't always depend upon mass-market media chips (almost guaranteed to be infected by AACS licensing... at least, in the US, Europe, and Australia) being available & documented.

Re:The easy way

[lightknight]

Indeed. For some odd reason, people have such an aversion to just buying a PC, and hooking it up to the TV. People who will buy MP4-capable DVD players, who will spend hours re-encoding things so that they can watch it on the screen 20 feet from their PC. They all want appliances, for some odd reason, even though the decoding (let alone the encoding) of most popular items requires a rather powerful (by most PC OEM standards) machine. I'm starting to think it's almost racist bias towards having a 'PC' machine in the living room (nevermind the X-Box, Wii, and PS3), like they're trying to win a bet with someone, but can't admit they lost it years ago.

$800 for an appliance that cannot decode half the formats you have encountered, and will not decode the more-CPU / GPU intensive ones coming out later this year? Hell yeah, hook that up to the TV. Even has a 20GB hard drive, imagine that.

$800 for a PC with stereo out and HDMI, that can decode anything you throw at it? With a 2 TB hard drive? Why would I want that?

Why does the populace seem to treat machines like lepers?

Re:The easy way

[SeaFox]

I see you failed to full understand the post you replied to. The point here is not to have to transcode at all.

AppleTV is just as limited as the other "appliances". Apple is all NIH when it comes to OGG and FLAC audio, or video files in MKV containers, or even MP4 if you don't use the "right" h264 profiles.

WD and the Chinese no-name devices actually accept more media types than an AppleTV.

Raspberry Pi

[Auroch]

I've gotta say, that if you're not aware of the Raspberry PI project, then you're asking the wrong question.

XBMC

[GeneralTurgidson]

Small form factor media PC running XBMC will do everything you want and more.

How far do you want to go?

[solidraven]

A good ARM board with proper multimedia functionality should be sufficient (I think the Beagle board might be sufficient). Though obviously the larger FPGAs would excel at this. But it'd take quite a lot of time to rewrite everything in VHDL or Verilog. And even then, you'd need one of the larger more expensive FPGA's with enough slices. In the end it'd be easier to grab an old computer and make your own IR sensor and use one of those universal remotes with it.

You seem to have a realistic idea, at least

[damn_registrars]

The quote of

I also think it will a good programming adventure

Indicates that at least you have some sense of what it will take to do this and what the end result may (or may not) end up like. Too many people would go into a project like this with the idea of saving money (doesn't work) or making something that is better than mass market version s and usable by others in the household (no real chance of that).

But if you're looking for an adventure, this may be a good choice for you.

The big picture

[zAPPzAPP]

[TPB] ---Internet---> [PC] ---LAN/WLAN---> [NAS] ---LAN/WLAN---> [HTPC with XBMC] ---HDMI---> [TV] ---vision---> [guy on couch]

Go and fetch the parts you are currently missing.

Re:The big picture

[girlintraining]

Go and fetch the parts you are currently missing.

I have everything else, but I'm presently missing "[guy on couch]". I've never run into a distribution system that required one. But if I must have one, can you tell me what the minimum system requirements are? I'm not sure what the battery life of 'guy on couch' is, but I've heard from my heterosexual friends that economy models generally weigh more, have limited ram, and the processor has what was described to me as a "very aggressive power saving feature". I'd also like to know how much these things cost and if there are any maintenance requirements beyond feeding him and giving him access to the bathroom. Again, very new to the market, so apologies in advance.

Chinese Android TV box

[dmesg0]

For ~70$ you can buy a chinese box running Android with HDMI output, wi-fi and remote on sites like dealextreme, merimobiles, pandawill etc. Something like this
(it's just an example, there are literally hundreds of slightly different options):
http://www.merimobiles.com/GV_11A_VI6131_Android_2_3_TV_Box_1080P_1GHz_HDMI_p/meri3957.htm

Don't expect it to work well out of the box, but as a DIY project it should be fine. You can write a custom android app to control it, or install something like plex for android.
For more possibilities, make sure you get a device with an available root access.

Just went 'back' to XBMC.

[AbRASiON]

Was using PS3 w/Media Centre (DLNA streaming app) on a PC.
Then I read up cinavia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1265114

Decided to convert my NAS
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=hp%20microserver&hl=en&meta= into a HTPC with a slimline video card (40$) and put XBMC on it (plus XBMC remote for Android, no IR, no bluetooth required)

Has been better than expected, XBMC came a long long long way since my Xbox 1.
Playback is smooth, UI is good, even installed MySQL on the little NAS and now the library can be accessed around the house easily with multiple copies of XBMC tied in to the main box.
Very good stuff.

Mini-ITX Intel Atom-NVIDIA-ION and XBMC

[LikwidCirkel]

Tiny cheap solutions like the raspberry pi are kind of limited.

I've got an Intel Atom/NVidia ION mini ITX board that was pretty cheap. It has a single PCIe x16 slot and 4 SATA ports and was worth less than $100. There are similar chipsets which I'm sure would work equally well and still beat the crap out of tiny boards like R Pi.

It's a file server, a media center, and it even does well with office suites and web browsing. Media players like XBMC are no problem, as are standard peripherals like wireless keyboards. I can also drop in up to 4Gigs of RAM and some 12TB of hard drive space.

Way, way way more flexible than any ARM device on the market could possibly be, and much more mature and easier to get working for multiple common tasks - not just playing media.

Asus EeeBox, XBMC, diskless.

[Strider-]

This is what I just put together. System PXE Boots Debian, and starts up XBMC within about 20 seconds. When running, it's only 25 watts or so, and it boots fast enough that I have no problems shutting it down when not in use. Plays 1080p high profile smooth as silk.

What about a Roku and Plex?

[darkgumby]

I have a Roku 2XS. It has a Plex client. I've run the Plex server on my Mac and on an Ubuntu box and in both cases this setup works just fine. I've streamed a handful of movies and TV shows and so far am very satisfied with the results. I have an older Linksys E1000 using stock firmware. I haven't even bothered to optimize my wifi network. With some QOS I might get higher quality streaming but I have an old SD TV so my standards are low. Will get an HDTV sometime this year and will want 720p or better so will probably upgrade the WLAN. When I had the Plex server running under Ubuntu it was running inside of a Proxmox VM. That worked really well. I'm rebuilding the Proxmox host now and will probably go back to that setup.