Multimedia-Box.
Today, home entertainment appliances are usually based on closed,
proprietary hardware and software design supporting only a limited set
of media types, stream formats, and entertainment options. With the
availability of cheap, small, quiet, and powerful multimedia PCs, it
is now possible to create an open and extensible PC-based platform for
multimedia home entertainment.
Software. The Multimedia-Box application is based on NMM and provides an
integrated and extensible software solution for a networked Multimedia
Home-Entertainment Center running on a Linux-PC. Following features
are available:
-
CD-Player with CDDB support
-
CD-Grabber and transcoding to MP3/OggVorbis
-
DVD-Player with support for menus
-
DVD-Grabber with transcoding to DivX video and MPEG audio in an AVI
file. Furthermore, the transcoding task can transparently be
distributed to remote hosts that provide more processing power.
-
TV (analog or digital) plus time-shifting. Furthermore, for hosts that
do not have direct access to a analog or digital TV source (e.g. via a
PCI board), a remote host can transparently provide this
functionality.
-
Video recorder functionality and Electronic Program Guide using either DVB or XMLTV as data source and simple web interface
-
Play-list: creation of play lists with all supported media types.
-
Configuration dialog
-
Multi-tasking: watch TV while transcoding a DVD.
-
All controllable with a remote-control (or via keyboard when
running as standard desktop application)
-
Customizable on-screen display (skinning)
-
Extensible and configurable application framework (XML)
Hardware.
A detailed description of the hardware and the system configuration
of our current Multimedia-Box can be found on our Hermes page.
We also provide a German version of the Hermes page.
The hardware we used for our first Multimedia-Box is
described in the report named The Multimedia-Box - Design and
Development of a Multimedia Home Entertainment System for Linux;
the second Multimedia-Box is described in Marc Klein's Diploma Thesis
(german only, sorry). All documents can be found here. If you have successfully
built a Multimedia-Box, we would like to hear from you
Conference/Workshop Papers
-
Marco Lohse,
Michael Repplinger, and
Philipp Slusallek
Dynamic Media Routing in Multi-User
Home Entertainment Systems
in Proceedings of The Eleventh
International Conference on Distributed
Multimedia Systems DMS'2005, Banff, Canada,
September 5-7, 2005
[abstract],
[bib],
[pdf]
- Marco Lohse and
Philipp Slusallek
Middleware Support for Seamless Multimedia Home Entertainment for Mobile Users and Heterogeneous Environments
in Proceedings of The 7th IASTED International Conference on
Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications (IMSA) 2003, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, August 13th-15th, 2003
[abstract], [bib], [pdf]
- Marco Lohse and
Philipp Slusallek
An Open Platform for Multimedia Entertainment Systems
EUROPRIX Scholars Conference at MindTrek Media Week 2002, Tampere, Finland, November 14th-15th, 2002
[abstract], [bib], [pdf], [ps.gz]
Other
-
Marco Lohse
Ein Knoten für alle Fälle, NMM - Vernetztes Multimedia Home Entertainment mit Linux
c't - Magazin für Computertechnik, pages 232-237, issue 22, 2003
[online]
Diploma Theses, Department of Computer Science, Saarland University
-
Marc Klein
Design and Development of a Multimedia Home-Entertainment System
(in german, "Design und Entwicklung eines Multimedia Home-Entertainment Systems")
2003-01 [pdf]
Advanced Practicals
-
Patrick Becker, Patrick Cernko, Wolfgang Enderlein, Marc Klein, Markus Sand
The Multimedia-Box - Design and Development of a Multimedia Home Entertainment System for Linux
2002-10
[pdf]
Documentation
Photos, Screenshots
Videos (June 2003)
Links
|
Multimedia-Box.
Today, home entertainment appliances are usually based on closed,
proprietary hardware and software design supporting only a limited set
of media types, stream formats, and entertainment options. With the
availability of cheap, small, quiet, and powerful multimedia PCs, it
is now possible to create an open and extensible PC-based platform for
multimedia home entertainment.