Mailing List Archive

has anyone looked at the prismiq mediaplayer
http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/video/5e77/

It says its running debian linux (embedded) and has an mpeg decoder in
it. Looks like it might make an nice frontend box for mythtv, has ir
remote and everything.

Was just curious if people had looked at it or thought it might be a
possibility? Not sure how difficult setting up a cross compilier
environment for it would be. Might be easier to replace the backend
portion with hooks into mythbackend (currently their backend only runs
under windows) and keep it's frontend.

Eric
RE: has anyone looked at the prismiq mediaplayer [ In reply to ]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net
> [mailto:mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net]On Behalf Of Eric Estabrooks
> Sent: Thursday, 12 June 2003 11:30 AM
> To: mythtv-users@snowman.net
> Subject: [mythtv-users] has anyone looked at the prismiq mediaplayer
>
>
> http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/video/5e77/
>
> It says its running debian linux (embedded) and has an mpeg decoder in
> it. Looks like it might make an nice frontend box for mythtv, has ir
> remote and everything.
>
> Was just curious if people had looked at it or thought it might be a
> possibility? Not sure how difficult setting up a cross compilier
> environment for it would be. Might be easier to replace the backend
> portion with hooks into mythbackend (currently their backend only runs
> under windows) and keep it's frontend.
>

Looks nice but given that is a non x86 CPU and has custom hardware for
decoding, you'll need special drivers and won't be able to simply compile
Myth for it. However if it's running linux that might make it just that
little bit easier.

Either way it's not a out of the box solution and would certainly be more
complex and more work to get going over an X-Box.

My 2c

CH
Re: has anyone looked at the prismiq mediaplayer [ In reply to ]
Christian Hack wrote:

>>http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/video/5e77/
>>
This looks great :-)

I can already see a number of other uses for that - external D/A audio
converter, x terminal (assuming I can connect a mouse) etc. :)

*

>>Was just curious if people had looked at it or thought it might be a
>>possibility? Not sure how difficult setting up a cross compilier
>>environment for it would be.
>>
I don't know either.

>>Might be easier to replace the backend portion with hooks into mythbackend (currently their backend only runs under windows) and keep it's frontend.
>>
That's what I thought as well. Their frontend looks very nice.

They have docs on how to add new video formats
<http://update.prismiq.com/plugins/>.

As I would expect from stuff sold by thinkgeek, they seem to be quite
open <http://www.prismiq.org> and with the Open-Source spirit. Sounds
decent, from a quick look.

hm, maybe we could convince that company to sell prebuilt MythTV boxen?
;-) *hide*
Re: has anyone looked at the prismiq mediaplayer [ In reply to ]
On Wed, 2003-06-11 at 18:30, Eric Estabrooks wrote:
> http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/video/5e77/
>
> It says its running debian linux (embedded) and has an mpeg decoder in
> it. Looks like it might make an nice frontend box for mythtv, has ir
> remote and everything.
>
> Was just curious if people had looked at it or thought it might be a
> possibility? Not sure how difficult setting up a cross compilier
> environment for it would be. Might be easier to replace the backend
> portion with hooks into mythbackend (currently their backend only runs
> under windows) and keep it's frontend.
>
> Eric

It would probably take some work to get all of the tools together, but
would certainly be possible. Setting up a GNU toolchain for
cross-compiling isn't that difficult - check out O'Reilly's "Building
Embedded Linux Systems" for a step-by-step guide. I'd suggest lurking
on their dev site or waiting for a hack site to crop up (it's
inevitable).

I haven't looked closely at the MythFrontend code to be certain, but I
don't think that theres anything that would tie you to x86. Can anyone
confirm this?

My MythFE/Pundit distribution (work-in-progress) is built entirely with
GNU and other open-source components; when complete, it would be pretty
easy to tweak to be useful in any frontend system. All of the
components are cross-compilable. It could also be extended to support a
full frontend/backend solution, though that is not my goal (check the
message archives for more info)

== Steve
RE: has anyone looked at the prismiq mediaplayer [ In reply to ]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net
> [mailto:mythtv-users-bounces@snowman.net]On Behalf Of Steve Davidson
> Sent: Friday, June 13, 2003 12:40 AM
> To: Discussion about mythtv
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] has anyone looked at the prismiq mediaplayer
>
>
> I haven't looked closely at the MythFrontend code to be certain, but I
> don't think that theres anything that would tie you to x86. Can anyone
> confirm this?

Check the list archives; somebody at one point reportedly built mythfrontend
on a LinuxPPC system. So, not only a different processor architecture, but
big-endian vs. little-endian.

-JAC