MythTV Library On Apple TV Without A Jailbreak

August 2, 2012 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Dan] wrote in to share a link to his MythTv to Apple TV setup. He found a way to make the recordings he made on his Linux box available on the 2nd Generation Apple TV. Our first thought is that he would use XBMC on a jailbroken device but that is not the case. The secret is to roll iTunes into the mix.

Take a look at the diagram above. The system starts with an Arch Linux box that runs MythTV, an open source program which allows you to record from tuner or encoder hardware. But actually watching those recordings on an iOS device is difficult for a couple of reasons. First, Apple likes to keep their devices locked up tight in hopes that you buy your entertainment rather than watching over-the-air records. Second, if you’re recording ATSC channels the files may be 1080i or 1080p, neither of which can be handled by the Apple TV 2. [Dan] gets around this by first using the command line version of Handbrake to transcode the recordings to an h264 format. He then uses iTunes running on an Windows 7 virtual machine (on the Linux box) to host the transcoded files in a library the Apple TV can access.

Digital TV Converter Reverse Engineering

August 1, 2012 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

Back when broadcast television was first switching over from analog to digital most people needed to get a converter box to watch DTV broadcasts. Remember that abomination that was “HD-Ready”? Those TVs could display an HD signal, but didn’t actually have a digital tuner in them. Nowadays all TVs come with one, so [Craig] found his old converter box was just gathering dust. So he cracked it open and reverse engineered how the DTV hardware works.

The hardware includes a Thompson TV tuner, IR receiver for the remote control, and the supporting components for an LGDT1111 SoC. This is an LG chip and after a little searching [Craig] got his hands on a block diagram that gave him a starting place for his exploration. The maker of the converter box was also nice enough to include a pin header for the UART. It’s populated and even has the pins labeled on the silk screen. We wish all hardware producers could be so kind. He proceeds to pull all the information he can through the terminal. This includes a dump of the bootloader, readout of the IR codes, and much more.

Diablo 3 Is An Arcade Game, Apparently

July 26, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

MAME cabinets are simply awesome. They’re a great way to relive the stained and sticky fluorescent carpets, loud noises, and Neon signs and blacklights of old arcades. If there’s one problem with MAME cabinets, it’s that gaming has moved on from the quarter-eating cabinets of yesteryear. It simply doesn’t make sense to put Starcraft, TF2, or other popular games in an arcade cabinet.

[Dave] grew up playing Gauntlet in the arcade, but the various console ports never lived up to the experience of playing it with a joystick and buttons. When Diablo 3 came out, [Dave] knew what he had to do. He built a Diablo 3 arcade cabinet, fully playable and faithful to the dungeon crawlers of yore.

Thankfully, an old cabinet wasn’t gutted for this build; a month before the game came out, [Dave] picked up a few pieces of plywood and built himself an arcade cabinet. After applying some very nice graphics and installing buttons and a joystick, [Dave] had a fully functional Diablo arcade game that doesn’t even require quarters.

Recently, we’ve seen our share of builds that turn traditional game controls on their head, a trend we hope continues. You can check out [Dave]’s demo video after the break.

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One Remote To Stream Them All

July 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

We’d bet that most readers stream video as the lion’s share of their entertainment consumption. It’s getting easier and easier thanks to great platforms like XBMC, but not everything is available in one place, which can be a bit off-putting. [Tony Hoang] is trying to simplify his viewing experience by creating one remote to rule all of his streaming software. He’s got an HTPC connected to his entertainment center, and used a bit of scripting to add some functionality to this Lenovo N9502 remote control.

The hack is entirely software-side. The remote already works quite well, but he remapped the home, end, and page up buttons, as well as the mouse controller. The three buttons will launch XBMC, Hulu, and Netflix respectively. They are also set to kill the other applications before launch so that one button will do everything needed to switch between one another. The mouse remapping takes care of up, down, left, and right keys for navigation in the UI and control of the playing videos. See a demo of the setup after the break.

Everything was done with autohotkey scripts for Windows. But this should be easy to code with other OSes as well. If you’re prone to have a slip of the finger you might want to work out a double-click to launch the applications so you don’t accidentally hit a key in the middle of your favorite show.

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Create A Laminar Flow Jet Without Pesky Fiber Optics.

July 24, 2012 by Jesse Congdon 15 Comments

[ApexLogic] had some PMMA core acrylic rod rod left over from a project and decided to use it as the lighting element in a laminar flow water jet.

The typical water jet consists of a bunch of sponges and drinking straws sandwiched together to slow a rough water stream and then a finely cut nozzle to provide a smooth ripple-free strand of clear water. If light is applied to this stream of water it tends to act similarly to fiber optics. [ApexLogic], however, uses a combination of shaved PVC filings, Brillo, and what appears to be most of the plumbing aisle of a local hardware store to get the same laminar flow. To top it off the polished acrylic rod is much less fragile than its glass-fiber counterpart and can have a high power light glued to the end for a nice water tight seal.

The system currently runs off of garden hose pressure, and would probably need some kind of a boost before it went into that front yard mega fountain that [Caleb] is still waiting for somebody to make. If you still need some clarity on laminar water jets check out these videos on a few

XBMC Hits Android

July 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 71 Comments

XBMC just issued the announcement we’ve been waiting to hear for some time now. The Android platform is now officially supported. Having seen the popularity of this open source media center software, and the willingness of some to spend hundreds of dollars on small computers to use it as their set-top-box interface of choice, we knew it was only a matter of time before a hardware manufacturer stepped up to the plate. In this case it is a company called Pivos Technology Group, who helped fund the push to bring XBMC to Android.

The good news is that the Android version of XBMC should work on a very wide range of devices. The bad news is that it will take a bit of time for that wide range of devices to support hardware video acceleration. Right now the only platform that has the hardware accelration for all video formats is the Pivos XIOS DS unit seen above. Looks a bit like a white version of the Apple TV huh? This turns out to be a great alternative to the Apple hardware, which requires a jailbreak to run XBMC and there is no jailbreak available for the current generation of that hardware. You can grab the XIOS DS for about $100-120, and as you can see after the break, it runs XBMC without a hitch, shows the ability to navigate menus while 1080p video is playing, and demonstrates working video plug-ins.

Plus, it’s an Android device with access to apps like any other. We looked around and it seems the Netflix app will work, but there is currently a problem with the video driver on units which have been upgraded to ICS. You can check out an unboxing of the device in this forum post, which is where we got the image seen above.

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Fighting Over The Frat’s TV Remote

June 29, 2012 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Colin Bookman] lives in a Fraternity house and apparently the remote for the cable box has a way of walking off. He figured out a method to give everyone control of the TV channel in one form or another.

The cable box can be seen perched on that shelf, and [Colin’s] addition is the wooden box sitting on the floor. Inside is an Arduino board, and the cable snaking out of the enclosure is an IR LED. This give the Arduino the ability to send remote control commands to the TV box. The two arcade buttons on the front will switch the channel up or down.

But this is hardly a remote control replacement since you have to get up to use it, so he went a few steps further. The Arduino board was paired with an Ethernet shield. It serves up a web page that has a virtual keypad. So anyone with a smart phone or laptop can log into the server and start changing the channels. We’re not sure if this provides relief from a missing remote, or promotes impromptu fist fights when brothers can’t agree on what to watch. It certainly opens up the possibility of long-distance trolling as you could be sitting in class and decide to change the channel to Lifetime every ten minutes or so.

If you don’t have an Ethernet shield handy we’ve seen a similar setup that uses Bluetooth instead the network.