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January 28, 2012 8:19 pm
nowhereman: I donated 60 days of cpu time to WCG during the past week t.co/szOGvR6X #wcgrid
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1:13 pm
billcorbett99: @nowhereman If you don’t think you can grab my show on Vimeo, what about Youtube. I have clips from my show all on my Youtube channel. Thnks
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12:50 pm
billcorbett99: @nowhereman My TV show CREATING COOPERATIVE KIDS is hosted on Vimeo. Doesn’t this make it an easy MRSS for you to pick up my show?
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January 27, 2012 1:32 pm
aravindakshan_t: @nowhereman Ooops, tx 4 ur warning n fixing my sentence
I recently became the proud owner of a Chumby 8 (thanks Mom and Dad!). At first blush, Chumby 8 is not much more than a bigger Chumby. Unlike it’s smaller siblings, it has a web browser built in, but I really can’t think of an occasion where I’d want to surf the web on the [...]
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billcorbett99: @nowhereman If you don’t think you can grab my show on Vimeo, what about Youtube. I have clips from my show all on my Youtube channel. Thnks
billcorbett99: @nowhereman My TV show CREATING COOPERATIVE KIDS is hosted on Vimeo. Doesn’t this make it an easy MRSS for you to pick up my show?
aravindakshan_t: @nowhereman if i remove ur YouTube pvt channel frm my gen 1 Roku, will i loose d channel forever? any idea on official YouTube on Roku?
catastrophegirl: @StreamFREE_tv only @nowhereman knows for sure. actually i don’t even know if channel developers can see how many delete/re-adds they get
nowhereman: [AppleInsider] Apple earns record $13B on sales of 37M iPhones, 15M iPads and 5.2M Macs t.co/upQ6oPR6
kcorrigan13: @nowhereman Do you have a golf channel? Looking for streaming golf instruction (Golf Fix, etc.)
Hacking Chumby 8
I recently became the proud owner of a Chumby 8 (thanks Mom and Dad!). At first blush, Chumby 8 is not much more than a bigger Chumby. Unlike it’s smaller siblings, it has a web browser built in, but I really can’t think of an occasion where I’d want to surf the web on the device. Aside from that, Chumby 8 plays widgets and streams audio from the internet just like other Chumbies.
The most exciting difference between Chumby 8 and the other models is its ability to play video. For a while, I tried using a Sony Dash for video, but quickly became frustrated with it’s poor interface and lack of a decent podcast client. Out of the box, Chumby 8 isn’t much different. In fact, its video features are much worse than those on the Dash. Both let you play video stored on a USB drive, but the Dash also lets you watch Netflix, Crackle, and a few other “premium” video services. You won’t find any of that on the Chumby, but that’s ok because I really have no desire to watch Netflix on a picture frame. What I do want to do is be able to watch a few video podcasts without having to manually load the files on a USB stick and sneaker-net them over to the device for playback.
With the Dash, this is impossible because of the degree to which the device is locked down, probably so they could pass Netflix certification. But with the Chumby, we’re in luck. Because the device is much more open than the Dash, it’s possible to download and playback video content entirely on the device itself. No sneaker-net needed.
So how can we programmatically play a video file on the Chumby8? First we need to ssh into the device, so we need to enable sshd. Make your way into the Chumby’s settings screen and tap on “Device info”. On the Device Info screen, you will see a little pi symbol in the corner. Tap the pi. On the screen that’s displayed next, tap the button labeled “SSHD”. Done!
Now you can ssh into your Chumby as root and have all kinds of fun. Beware, by default there is no password for the root account, so take whatever security precautions are necessary for your particular environment.
Once you’re logged into the Chumby you can play a video on its screen from the command line. For demonstration purposes, let’s assume that there is a USB drive connected to the Chumby and it has a video on it called myVideo.mp4. First, navigate to the USB drive. The path may vary depending which USB port your drive is connected to:
> cd /mnt/usb > ls
You should see a list of files on your USB drive, including myVideo.mp4. Before we can play the video, we need to kill the Chumby’s control panel. That’s the piece of software that controls the Chumby UI:
> stop_control_panel
Now we can play the video:
> gst-app myVideo.mp4
That’s it. Your video should be playing on the Chumby’s screen. But suppose we wanted to play a video from the internet without downloading it first. I had mixed results doing this, but it is at least semi-possible:
> gst-stream-h264aac http://www.example.com/myVideo.mp4
These tricks, combined with cron and some basic perl scripting (both cron and perl are installed on the Chumby by default), and you can do some pretty fun stuff. For instance, I can have my Chumby magically greet me every morning at 9am by playing the previous night’s Rachel Maddow Show. No more podcast client running on a separate machine. No more manually copying files to USB drives. No more sneaker-net!
billcorbett99: @nowhereman Let me figure out how to create an MRSS of my show and get back to you. Its a parenting show I’d like to add to your family area
nowhereman: @billcorbett99 most of Nowhere TV is video podcasts and MRSS feeds. If you have either, dropping it in is trivial.
billcorbett99: @nowhereman how can I have my TV show for parents to be considered to be carried on nowheretv?
MichaelMassing: @nowhereman re: @1_RighteousBabe Sounds like your name has been randomly slotted into a template, a typical tactic of twitterspammers.
nowhereman: mis-attribution. I didn’t write that comment. “ @1_RighteousBabe: I just got one of the best comments from @nowhereman… on my blog.”
1_RighteousBabe: I just got one of the best comments from @nowhereman I’ve ever received on my blog. #encouraged
StreamFREE_tv: @MyClonesAction CatholicTV has a .m3u8 stream. t.co/l8QOXPjX @nowhereman may be able to add to #roku NowhereTV for you.
nowhereman: @DrLaserfalcon Thanks. That baseball stuff is some of the original content from when it was PodTV and I was just learning BrightScript
DrLaserfalcon: @nowhereman We’ve got a few gems like t.co/Sr7xBMkH — full length docus. BTW, I’m a huge fan of your NowhereTV baseball lineup.
nowhereman: @DrLaserfalcon Slick. I like the UI. Wish there was more long form stuff, but that’s the nature of the beast with online video.
DrLaserfalcon: @nowhereman Hey dude, check out our new free iPad app. Would love to hear feedback from a video buff such as yourself. t.co/IMPrVbrI
nowhereman: I hope so, but I doubt it. “ @rotemgear: @nowhereman The question is, have the people in DC who *need* to know noticed.”
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