August 5, 2005 on 9:41 am | In Making | 3 Comments

ok, now to make it actually do stuff!

Firstly the baics:
Windows
XP
Windows
firewall & anti-spyware
NOD32 anti-virus
Oh,
and I couldn’t resist installing Firefox as
well

As I mentioned before, I did previously try using linux to run a media
box, but I really just don’t have the time for the necessary tinkering
to get it to work. For once, some credit has to go to Microsoft -
windows is a standard, for better or worse, and that’s actually quite
helpful – all sorts of eosteric bits of hardware have a tendancy to
‘just work’ due to their having Windows drivers already. Which is
actually rather handy from time to time. (I still prefer Mac OS X for
my home machines, however)

Now,
to actually run the media playback side of things, I looked into
various software packages – some free (freevo) and some not
(meedio) but
I settled on Beyond
Media for it’s “just work”-ing ness. It also works
very well with my touch screen, and with the addition of a handy
plugin, it works with the Remote Control I have
too.

If you’re interested here’s the page for the remote control drivers
and
here’s the page for the touchscreen drivers… Just in case you’re
building something like this yourself.

So shockingly, it all
works!
Yay! I can play back DVDs, music and videos, and Beyond Media even has
some very
handy plugins to download Weather information, Movie
Trailers
and cinema showtimes, and I could even write my own (although lack of
free time rather suggests that I won’t).

Here’s the result so far:

(and yes, I do have Beaver and Steve comics posted up)

So now we ‘just’ need to cram all of that into the old Mac
case….

Next time, I’ll bring you up to date on where I am now, and in the
meantime hopefully make some more progress on the mod!