What work should I do now, development wise?

[Speedy2206]

I have decided that using a mac to try to develop things is just not working for me - everything just seems ridiculously complicated and even the most simplest of tasks have to be performed the long way. For that reason I have decided to make DEBIAN LINUX my primary OS, and dual boot that alongside Windows XP.

That means I'll have a completely clean system to work with, and I'll be able to concentrate on getting something done instead of trying little bits and pieces which really arent going to plan. So this poll is just a quick way of seeing what I should concentrate on.

I would like all the members of UKCVS to vote on ONE PROJECT which I can concentrate all my efforts into. Preferably this should be something that nobody else is working on yet, so that I don't cross paths and re-create existing work. Of course all source code will be shared once something is made.

You cannot vote for two projects, and the final resulting poll winner will be the item that I work on, nothing else. You all know me, I'll just try to do too many things at once and it'll all go wrong :P

If anyone has other ideas as to what can be added to the poll options then let me know.

[renwich]

as SS suggested BBC Iplayer

[gav12345]

as SS suggested BBC Iplayerme too

[turner123]

iplayer for me to.....i clicked other please can admin correct my vote thanks

[renwich]

done, I think lol

[Speedy2206]

Having just spent a few hours researching BBC iPlayer I'm not too sure if that option is feasible on the DBOX2. We could get it to authorize us and obtain the stream for the file, but it wouldnt be able to play it "out-of-the-box". Even with libmp4 (MP4 support) we would only be able to get the audio, and that lib also requires several dependancies which would by themselves take up just under 12MB alone, needing to be resident in /lib (flash memory).

Thats fine for users with IDE kits (I think you can symlink), but in addition to this the only way that I know possible (without re-coding the majority of the neutrino movieplayer) to get the stream to play would be to run VLC locally on the box, and connect to it using 127.0.0.1. Unfortunately VLC again is big in size, and would require several dependancies taking up another 10MB or so (if not more - I havent actually calculated that one). Aside from that I can't seem to cross-compile VLC anyway.

Furthermore, an interface would be required to list the available iPlayer episodes which would involve a hell of a lot of work, and if the BBC ever changed their webpage HTML coding even just by one line then the whole thing would get broken rendering everything useless.

If you think of all the bits and pieces that are involved, and then consider how much RAM the DBOX2 has ... also taking into account how little RAM is available once the main neutrino interface is loaded ... you can see the problem. Free Space, RAM and Processor are all hardware limitations which cannot be avoided.

The only way to get this properly working would be for VLC to be installed on a real computer on the network (preferably a dual or quad core system), which downloads the selected title/episode and decodes/encodes it on-the-fly to give output which the DBOX can understand (raw TS or AVI for example). This method would actually work, but again involves setup of software on another computer, and still requires an interface to list the available titles/episodes on the DBOX itself.

FreddyFr0g has already done some amazing work on this if users wanted to go down that route and I'm sure he can help further, but having looked into it a bit more I think we can safely say that true iPlayer support will not be coming to a DBOX near you anytime soon.

Sorry
Maybe we can remove that option and those who voted for it can vote for something else??

[Derekwd]

What a pity, it would have been an awesome use for the old dbox in the future.
Thanks for the time and effort in trying m8.

Derek

[PaphosAL]

Hang on a mo, Speedy. What about your original CF idea of SD Card reader for dBox2? Would this allow us to break the barriers on limited dbox memory, with a 4 or 8gb card?

Cheers- AL

[pt-1]

The Dbox just has not got enough CPU Power to handle the BBC Stuff.
Using VLC running on a PC should be OK and Freddy modified the Stuff from Germany to work with the iPlayer page.

A good working Plugin is the iPlayer on the XBMC

http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-iplayer/


On another note,

did we ever get anywhere with the Red Button Stuff?

http://www.redbutton.dsl.pipex.com/

Speedys old Forum had a wealth of Information as we all met up there but I assume it's all gone.

The Virgin Box actually allows to use iPlayer so maybe something could be done via the MHEG Option..?

I am not sure if we ever found anything on Cable but Freesat uses something simular and not OpenTV by our "Friend" Mr. Murdoch

http://code.google.com/p/openmheg/downloads/list Discussion

[renwich]

ok if the iplayer is not going to work, then I change my vote to setMyLocation