Digital Video Utopia

So i’m playing around with the idea of writing some simple plugins for either tivo or myth, and I’m waiting for a replacement tivo right now, so to really do anything on the project, I need to do it with myth (at least for the next week or two).

Anyway, i’m really excited about the fact that tivo is opening up their APIs w/ tivo HME

This feels to me like something that can give them the ‘edge’ they need to stay alive. In other news, i got 90% of the way through installing Myth on Debian (on top of new nvidia drivers, and reinstalling after i realized the default was still a 2.4 kernel). The last 10% is with a problem i’m having w/ myth connecting to my xserver. I may just install mandrake 10.1 tonight, as i found 10.1 myth packages. My guess is that it will be less work to do that than it would be to track down the xserve problem.

So many ideas bubbling

I’ve had lots of ideas bubbling around in my head recently. I’ve been thinking about setting up a MythTV box, because that piece of software is starting to look really sweet.

I’ve been a big fan of tivo forever, but all the added functionality of MythTV just keeps pushing me in the way of wanting to use it instead of the tivo.

Particularly, I like the fact that it can

  • Display RSS feeds
  • Play emulated ROMs
  • Give you weather
  • Play any content you already have on your PC (eg divx movies)
  • MythPhone — videoconferencing, how cool.

Also, aside from Myth, I am constantly blown away by the amount of innovation that’s going on — SOAP, RSS, Podcasting, the amount of influence blogs have, it’s just amazing. I’d like to write an essay on where I think we’re going to be in a couple years. Hopefully I’ll at least get around to writing a mini-essay soon.