Entertainment appliance :: To provide a non-technical and user-friendly TV-based media appliance capable of servicing most types of couch-delivered media.
Project output should include hardware component information, hardware assembly instructional documentation, software mirror, software installation documentation and operating documentation (if necessary).
Description:
The home theatre personal computer (HTPC) era took off in the mid naughties (2005+) as companies fought to make television proprietary by monopolising the TV appliance market-place, effectively requiring one physical device per media source, per display. The open source community demonstrated that the technology already existed to build such appliances cost effectively and feature rich enough to rival any of the then available (or proposed) commercial technologies; and development continued to improve user experience ever further.
In the years since, little has changed, with the battle focused on becoming the dominant set-top box. Panel display OEMs include embedded computers (with embedded open source software) capable of accessing streaming content from public providers such as Youtube and private providers, such as Netflix, joining the ranks of the gaming consoles before them. Meanwhile, a range of commercial devices have appeared from new media content providers, such as Apple and Amazon, each attempting to be the one-box to rule them all, where none are open platforms that can be freely customised/modified.
The attention from this activity has resulted in video and audio codecs being implemented in commodity hardware, dramatically reducing the amount of compute required to drive playback. Yet, the simultaneous introduction of multi-core CPUs has meant the total cost of the hardware required to build a HTPC has plummeted, while the quality of open source media software has excelled making the more viable and valuable then ever.
Each generation of the Jupiter project has been named after the moons of Jupiter. This current generation is the second generation of Jupier, known as Adrastea.
Jupiter Generation 1 - Metis (2006-2016)
Project Jupiter brought Linux to life as a remote-controlled TV device, like a VCR or DVD player, able to be operated by anyone in the family. It built an HTPC from any modern x86 computer and without specialist hardware, other than multi-port TV tuner cards.
Jupiter Generation 2 - Adrastea (2016-)
Taking advantage of more than a decade’s worth of hardware improvements, and asserting the principle of horizontal scalability, Jupiter is now a light-weight HTPC comprised of a central multi-core ARM processor and network bus connected capabilities, such as storage and multi-port TV tuner appliances.
Related projects have also been included, per the relevant era - such as the 2006 Midnight Code Theme for MythTV, the 2010 integration of the Kinect as a LIRC remote control, and the 2020 MooseFS Service Add-On for Kodi (for LibreELEC).
