Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

As a follow up to my previous, somewhat nonsensical post, I thought I should provide some technical details on what Freevo is, what it does and why I wanted to use it.

The why is pretty simple. I wanted an easy to navigate front end to my collection of movies, photos, and music. Granted, a lot of good front ends exist. Nautilus doesn’t completely suck anymore and is becoming pretty usable. Amarok is extremely good and highly recommended if you run Linux. Gthumb does a pretty good job of providing slideshows. However, they all suffer from one fatal flaw, they all require a mouse and a keyboard to be used effectively. Normally this is not a problem, but normally the computer you’re trying to control isn’t connected to your tv in the living room.

This is where Freevo comes in. It provides a simple interface to all of these types of media that can be controlled with a regular universal remote control.

On to the technical details:
The hardware for my box is pretty simple. I used a Biostar ideq 210v. The motherboard comes with on-board optical out, which I’ve connected to my receiver. The graphics card is based on the nVidia GeForce FX 5200. The version I have is made by PNY and has two rgb outs and one s-video out. I’ve used an AMD Athlon XP 1200+, 256MB of RAM, and a Samsung DVD+/-RW drive. In other words, relatively cheap and inexpensive parts.

As far as software goes, I installed Slackware 11 and the latest Dropline Gnome. Slackware is an almost trivial install (or maybe I’ve done it way too much) and dropline has very good instructions.

Once all that was setup, I installed all the freevo pre-requisites. I already had a lot of these, but mplayer and Lirc were two key non-python things that Slackware and Dropline don’t have. Thankfully, these are also relatively easy to install from source.

After that, just run the freevo install script and it should all be up and running.

Some caveats:
Lirc can be a real pain to setup. It took me a few times to get a sensible remote file. The key to using the irrecord tool is to hold the buttons down long enough. If the program writes out a configuration file in “raw mode,” it’s unlikely most of your buttons will work.

Freevo comes with a lot of plug-ins. The only ones I’ve tried using so far are weather and rss reader. Both seem to have issues. The weather plug-in grabs data from an msnbc web service, which returns very random looking data. The rss reader appears to crash on some feeds, but works for most of them. I really hope some of the other plug-ins work better.

And finally, a picture of the home theater setup:

An emerging story of this blog is convergence. I’ve talked about how cool it would be to surf the web on the DS (Lik-sang closing shop put a damper on that), the neatness of the Sony Mylo mobile platform, amongst other things.

This is a bit of a surprise to me, since I’ve always been somewhat anti-convergence. To me, it goes opposite of picking the right tool for the job. For instance, it’d be hard to convince me that a cellphone would make a good music player, or camera. There just isn’t enough space for quality optics or a hard drive. If there was, then the thing’s too big or the battery’s too small.

However, it occurs to me that much of the convergence thus far has been service driven. The convergence exists because it will enable one entity to charge another for a “value-added” service (as if an even more annoying ring-tone adds value). We don’t have cameras on our cell phone because they are good cameras. We have them so that Verizon, etc. all can sell us a data plan.

Unfortunately, my natural cynicism made me miss the boat on real user-need driven convergence. While the Mylo is heavily flawed, it’s on the right track. It does wifi, voip, and play media, everything that I’d like while moving about and traveling.

Which brings me to the topic of this post: Freevo. Installing freevo is the latest in a series of steps that started with converting my CD library to MP3 three years ago. Back then, I just used a crufty laptop controlled via VNC to play music out to the stereo. That worked for a while, but then I wanted to watch movies, so I built a new box with tv-out and a dvd player. Now I just needed a way to control everything, which is where freevo comes in. After installing it, I’m pleasantly surprised at how straightforward it is to get to my music and movies, and I can do it all with a regular TV remote.

Had I not been so pig-headed about convergent tech, I probably would have done it long before. It just took a while for me to realize that I was trying to build a convergent device. The end result is that convergence shouldn’t be about crippling things in order to sell additional services. It should be about taking common ideas and putting them together in a sensible way, creating a device that’s actually nice to use.

In contrast to my cellphone, where most of the meta-keys take me to things I can buy but don’t want, the freevo and mylo let me get at what I need, when I need it efficiently. Convergence is going to continue, I just hope the vendors think about the users instead of the useless things they’d like to sell them.

While I really like OSX, there are still somethings that I miss about good X11 install. One of those is multiple desktops. Therefore I was forced to google and discovered Virtue Desktops. The transition between two desktops is pretty snazzy and the default key-bindings are pretty sensible. The only thing I don’t like is now difficult it is to move a window to another virtual console. You have to bring up the options screen with alt+ctrl+o, then select the console. You can’t just drag a window and move it. Still, for what claims to be alpha software, it’s been stable and useful.
Another OSX pet-peeve is the brain-dead lack of an options menu to change the ANSI color mappings in Terminal.app. When using white on black, vim is unusable because the yellow is far too bright and nearly impossible to see against the white. When reverse is chosen, color ls shows directories as a dark blue, again leading to vision difficulties. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to find a scheme that will work, since the ANSI colors are almost guaranteed to generate a conflict. To the rescue comes Terminal Colors. It’s simple and effective. Just install the plugin, view the ANSI Colors option under window settings and configure till all text becomes visible.