I've gotten the embedded bug lately. I dug around for an interesting hardware platform to work with and stumbled across the BeagleBoard. This 3×3″ board provides impressive multimedia capabilities via the TI OMAP35xx processor. It appears to serve the purpose I had long ago thought about for the miniITX boards – a media platform. miniITX is still useful for this, but this little board is even better suited to the task. But there are a lot fo things to be done to get it going.
So I've started a new project which I call beaglebox. The goal is to build a device that can play Internet video based on user selections, allowing users to be free of ISP-driven control of the online video experience. Initially the project is targeted at running under qemu to build the ui components without real media support. Once the core UI is ready the project will migrate to the hardware.
I've setup a SourceForge site and a wiki under my muse site. I've got a metabuild system ready that will bring up a kernel and file system running X and a basic blackbox window manager. The wiki lays out the plans for this project. I'm currently working to bring up matchbox instead of blackbox because Matchbox, possibly (likely) a modified version, will server as the core UI. Eventually MythTV and surf will be added to provide media support.
Feel free to comment on what you think of this project, including where you think it should lead and/or include.
I would love to see two beagle boards doing audio and video compress/decompress with each connected by cheap routers. i could walk around short range and video conference.think commercial applications.i would be happy to lend you two linksys 54g routers
with dd-wrt already installed. P.S thanks for all the graphics
tutorials!
I’m not sure I understand what the application is here. Are the BeagleBoards doing video capture or playback or both? If capture is involved, are they sending to each other, routed through the Linksys boxes? What exactly do you mean by “compress/decompress” – did you mean encoding/decoding?
My project is fairly simple – just video playback. No capture. Routing is handled by hooking the board up to any local home wireless network that routes to/from the Internet. In this example I have just one router (actually, in my house I have two – one for media systems and the other for the family laptops, to distribute the load). The boards handle video decoding (vs decompress) for display on TV monitors. They don’t do any encoding of video since they don’t do video capture.
Tell me more about what you’re thinking here.