Which book

Jason Dufair jase at dufair.org
Thu May 2 15:38:01 UTC 2002


Tim Rowledge wrote:

>I imagine the white book (multimedia stuff) and the nublue book (a fair
>bit of system technology detail) would both be useful. I presume you're
>going to be looking at much of the stuff in the linux based PVR recently
>slashdotted? I'd be inclined to do very similar hardware (since it's so
>cheap - hell, Fry's had 120Gb discs for $189 a few weeks ago!) and just
>do the software in Squeak instead of perl or whatever they used.
>Squeak can handle mp3 & mpeg video, speech generation ,sound sampling
>etc but I don't know what divx & wma are so who knows if they're usable.
>
Thanks, Tim.  I'll pick both of those up then.  I hadn't looked at the 
specs on that PVR yet.  It hit slashdot when I was heads down in code. 
 Thanks for the pointer.

DiVX is a lossy video codec, along the lines of MPEG, but much more 
efficient.  It's open source, so we should be good there.  WMA is 
Windows Media which is a framework for audio and video that's 
MS-specific.  I don't want my system to be platform dependent, but I 
would like it to be able to play the video and audio I have in WM* format.

>Getting a decent video quality on a TV screen will be interesting. You
>might want to investigate working with vector graphics rather than
>bitmaps, scaling up will be easier.
>
I'm really not worried about scaling at all.  I'm planning on a fixed 
resolution of 800 x 600.  I was planning on just using large 
anti-aliased fonts.  Vector formats are cool, but I don't expect to have 
to scale my images or text.

>I was dreaming about doing something like this myself, but even though
>it would be pretty cheap I still can't afford it :-( Perhaps the
>trickiest part is all the legal stuff. I'm quite sure you'll be breaking
>enough laws to get multiple death sentences if the evil maniacs at ##AA
>have their way.
>  
>
Ah, yes.  The media cartels.  I don't expect a lot of trouble with them as my system will not specifically be designed to share files.  I suppose building in a Gnutella client or something would be cool, but I only get maybe 1% of my media that way, so it's not a big draw for me.

-- 
Jason Dufair - jase at dufair.org
http://www.dufair.org/
"Wish I was a headlight on a northbound train
I'd shine my light through the cool Colorado rain"
-- The Grateful Dead






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