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:
While various companies move to monopolise the TV appliance market-place, the open source community has shown that the technology already exists to build such appliances cheaply and feature rich enough to rival any of the current (or proposed) commercial technologies.
Project Jupiter brings Linux to life as a remote-controlled TV device, like a VCR or DVD player, able to be operated by anyone in the family.
The pictures currently displayed with this project will be included in the hardware assembly documentation. The sequence of photos below document the assembly process using a half-height, appliance style, Silver Stone case. Once the assembly documentation is complete, these images will probably be removed.
As at May 2006, this project took another leap, with the creation of a high contrast "MidnightCode" theme for MythTV.
The theme itself has been a collaboration between the designer of Life is no Story Book and the programmer of Midnight Code, and is an extension of the original Midnight Code site design from the creative mind at LifeisnoStoryBook.com.
However, there was an under-whelming response to v1.0 which was later attributed to the "scrolling" navigation system. We were also able to identify that there are specific theme changes required for any theme to port from MythTV v0.18 to MythTV v0.19.
So, as at June 2006, theme version 1.1 for MythTV version 0.18 is complete - it features;
1) Support for the following MythTV modules; MythBrowser, MythDVD, MythGallery, MythGame, MythMusic, MythNews, MythPhone, and MythWeather. There is also coded, but untested, support for MythWebCam.
2) The theme itself is of reasonable contrast, so as to sustain good readability. It has also been designed to provide the most consistent navigation experience possible, across all modules/plugins.
3) The List View for MythVideo is recommended for the best mix of navigation and per-content item detail.
4) This theme was tested successfully on MythTV version 0.18.1
5) By popular demand, version 1.1 of the theme supports a visible row limit of seven (7) menu items. This removes the need for scrolling in the menu system.
This version of the theme makes the following acknowledgements;
Some graphics in this theme package are original graphics from the Abstract MythTV theme by Michael Jay Sherman and from the Default MythTV theme from the MythTV project. All other art-work for this theme was developed by Texas Slim of LifeisnoStorybook.com - she only stopped development to give birth.
For details on the installation and licensing of this theme, see the included README file.
In December 2010, the klirc program was authored to provide a gesture-to-lirc interface for the Kinect, under Linux. It will work with any lirc interfacing program (such as XBMC, mplayer, etc), but has been built/tested for MythTV.
The klirc program itself was an experiment kicked off by the open sourcing of the Kinect, as sponsored by Adafruit (Thank-you Adafruit!). My friend and I acquired Kinect devices on his birthday in November 2010, to experiment with its features. I don't own an Xbox, and acquired the Kinect primarily to see if it really was possible to create a "wave remote" for MythTV, like the 2009 brochure-ware videos of Natal seemed to be promising. In a bitter twist of irony, my friend's Xbox red-ringed a week after he bought the Kinect, so his Mac has seen more Kinect action than his Xbox ;-)
For details on the installation and configuration of klirc, see the included README file.
Also included here is the ulirc program, a predecessor to klirc, ulirc is a C implementation of the only UDP LIRC example that I could find in November 2010; John Pimble's lirc-udp.pl program. I have published ulirc to ensure that a C UDP LIRC client remains available for future integrators.
