Video



PiBox Media Center v0.11.0 Release 2016-10-11 The PiBox Media Center v0.11.0 binary releases are now available for download.  This release represents the first public release that will be demo’d at this weeks Maker Faire in Colorado Springs.  It’s focus has been on performance, usability and developer functionality. Additional Information Meetup […]

PiBox 0.11.0 release




One of the longterm goals for PiBox is to integrate it into the home.  I want to see the PiBox Server provide centralized communication for an array of IoT devices.  One way to do this is with Bluetooth Low-Energy, aka BLE, aka Bluetooth 4.0.  This specification allows very low power […]

PiBox: bluetooth for video means no omxplayer


Over the holiday I managed to close out a few nagging issues in the builds.  First, logins stopped working until I realized that I’d turned off the getty’s on tty0 and tty02.  This wasn’t the complete fix, however, as Busybox was adding /etc/securetty to the rootfs and that file did […]

BeagleBox: working Xorg and eth support




All the parts arrived by last Tuesday and I was able to boot the board using the validation images.  I explored the u-boot environment and dug around the root file system to see what the BeagleBoard folks had put together.  I booted the board using the serial console and connected […]

BeagleBox: reality sets in – boot issues



2
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 […]

Announcing BeagleBox: Internet video platform for the BeagleBoard



3
One of the drawbacks to dropping cable TV was losing summer broadcasts of pro tennis.  Recently my wife and daughter pointed out that you could watch some matches online via ESPN3.  So I tried to get it on the media box hooked to the big screen TV. I’ve got F12 […]

64 vs 32 bit flash: getting full screen flash ...


I've spent the past month preparing for and implementing a migration from Comcast cable TV to relying on both off-air HDTV and Internet video.  The easy part was dumping Comcast, though they magically managed to NOT turn off billing because they had to send out a service tech (for no […]

From Cable TV to Internet TV – A Nerd’s Journey


I tested the antenna in my basement with the first of two digital converters (the second from Amazon still hasn't arrived even though it was ordered the same day) and an analog TV.  The antenna was able to pick up all the expected channels which antennaweb.org said we should get.  […]

Antenna up, first digital box tested