14 ms·
Build your own Google TV using Raspberry Pi, Node.js and Socket.io
- emile818 13y agoNice!
- DonaldDerek 13y agoThanks!
- emile818 13y agoi will try it as soon as i have my rPi
- bahman2000 13y agoI just happen to have an extra rPi lying around. Thanks!
- panzerboy 13y agoThis is awesome! Do you have any plans to continue working on this?
- DonaldDerek 13y agoSure thing! I'm really surprised of all the feedback, let's fork it guys! I believe in an open world.
- Nux 13y agoI've already built myself a TV out of the Rpi, using OpenELEC+XBMC! Have a great remote, too in the form of the Yatse application. I do appreciate the "hackerness" attempt of the article though, it goes to show why the Pi is so cool.
- petepete 13y agoHaving tried just about every XBMC remote going (at least the ones I could find), Yatse is the best by a mile. Luckily my TV works well with libCEC, so I don't need my phone/tablet every time.
- Nux 13y agoCEC is great, sadly I only own a monitor, but I will definitely make sure my next TV set will be CEC-aware.
- DonaldDerek 13y agoOpenELEC+XBMC! Nice :D is it on github ? would like to give it a shot
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- arianvanp 13y agorepo: https://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv https://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv Install guide: http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=Building_and_Installing_OpenELEC_for_Raspberry_Pi http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=Building_and_Install...
- DonaldDerek 13y agoWill give it a shot over the weekend! Thanks for sharing!
- Flenser 13y agoPlease let us know how you get on. (I've subscribed to your blog.) I'm looking to do something similar and I'd be interested in how OpenELEC+XBMC compares to the setup you've described.
- tharshan09 13y agowoah, this is really cool. How does this compare to XBMC on the raspmc distro? I am really tempted to try this out on my rpi because a lot of the software stack used could be hacked on easily.
- DonaldDerek 13y agoThanks! It's a totally different architecture, I'm using Raspbian and WebSockets, really hacked this in 4 days..
- tharshan09 13y agoYes I understand that. I was just asking in terms of the features that it currently offers compared to XBMC?
- ck2 13y agoJust no netflix.
- beshrkayali 13y ago+1! Awesome work Donald!
- DonaldDerek 13y agoBeshr :D Thanks bro!
- esusatyo 13y agoSomebody please pack this all together and sell it for $50. This is how Apple do business. Sell hardware and software together.
- DonaldDerek 13y agoAhh would love to... and make it open!
- ern 13y agoSomebody please pack this all together and sell it for $50. This is how Apple do business. Sell hardware and software together. It's a very cool project for the technically savvy, but if you sell it to consumers, you'd have to provide support, something that could be time consuming. Or make it foolproof (Apple's strength). I have a Raspbmc setup, and I get a fair amount of interest from visitors who are impressed, and want their own cheap media centers. I dissuade them, unless I am sure they can troubleshoot computer issues, SSH/SFTP, image an SD card, and know basic SQL.
- DonaldDerek 13y agoThat's true, but with some serious development things can be possible, after all you need a community to cover your back to compete with the big names, and our community is RaspberryPi, Linux, and the open Web...
- buster 13y agoJust buy a raspberry pi + case for that amount of money and install openelec/raspbmc. I did that last week, it's a fantastic combination!
- pyre 13y agoI remember (maybe a year ago) people complaining about XMBC on RaspberryPI. Things like the menus being sluggish / having slight delays, maybe some issues with 1080p videos streaming over a network, etc. Have those been resolved?
- throwaway1979 13y agoThis is cool but this is not Google TV. The article title is misleading. I have a hard time even calling it a version of Google TV.
- mtgx 13y agoWhen I read it I thought they were building a customized version of Google TV, which was strange because I don't remember Google announcing that they've open-sourced Google TV (btw, is Google even allowed to do that?)
- DonaldDerek 13y agoThis is just a proof of concept, hacked it over the weekend :)
- TheCraiggers 13y agoAgreed. I originally clicked on it because I thought it might be a way to get Netflix working on my raspberrypi. I'm pretty sure I physically wilted in my chair when I saw it was nothing of the sort. As others are saying, it's still a good hack though. And while just installing a custom distro meant for XBMC on your rpi might be easier, putting something like this together by hand is a much better experience.
- basJam 13y agoAwesome! can't wait to work on this!
- mixnovich 13y agoAwesomeness.
- davedx 13y agoGreat! I'm about to start on a freelance project writing web stuff for set-top boxes, nice to see what's out there in the open source world. Thanks for posting. :)
- buster 13y agoNot Google TV. Not even close. Great work but what are the advantages over XBMC on the raspberry pi?
- DonaldDerek 13y agoThank you! It's just an experiment, I totally agree with you it's no way near a Google TV that thousands of engineer strive to put into production...
- baggachipz 13y agoThis really could be the start of something great. FWIW, here is what I think a media center should do, which no current solution achieves: Have a DVR-like interface, where all content is combined. This means downloaded torrents (by new and/or watched), with meta info. Also include new streams from HuluFlix based on when they were made available. New shows recorded from antenna and maybe QAM. New movies from Crackle, etc. The point is, I should be able to tell the application that I want all new episodes of "The Simpsons" and it will use all available configured sources to find what I want. It will present this to me in one comprehensive list. The source is irrelevant and I don't want to start various apps to find what I want. Google TV sort of tried to do this and failed. As cool as XBMC and their ilk are, they suffer from not passing the "wife test" and feature bloat. This thing, in my mind, should be dead simple to use.
- DonaldDerek 13y agoThanks for sharing this awesome vision, I totally agree, the Open Web deserves an Open TV :)
- snowpalmer 13y agoRoku does a great job of combining sources however it doesn't support DVR or local storage (i.e. Downloads) Boxee also did a great job of combining sources and did a good job with local storage. It also didn't support DVR. To be honest DVR is an animal that I've seen nobody crack successfully.
- baggachipz 13y agoSee, here's the thing about Roku and competitors (like the WD box, etc): they all require you to start different "apps" to browse different sources of content. I don't care where the content comes from, I just want to watch it. So, when I say "DVR", what I mean is a DVR-like interface to combine all content from various sources.
- sjs382 13y agoRoku supports a unified search now, though unified search doesnt support all apps/channels. It does support Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Vudu, and Crackle though. Also, most (all?) Roku's support local storage, but it isn't ideal. Usually, I need to throw some content on a thumbdrive and stick it into the Roku. Not horrible, but I wish I could use the Roku to download content to use it to stream via DLNA.
- jawerty 13y agoGreat (sigh)....now I need to get myself a Raspberry Pi
- germancito 13y agoThere is a commercial version of this running android http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/ http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/
- vlasta2 13y agoYou should throw in a kinect sensor (or any alternative) and have a very comfortable remote control.
- kayoone 13y agoRPI has a very mature version of XBMC working on it, so you are much better off with that for your home media center. BUT god this is a nice hacking project and i would love to see this being the start of an XBMC alternative open source project that is built upon web technology! Awesome!
- DonaldDerek 13y agoIndeed! Thanks for your comment!
- nivla 13y agoI hope so too. As much as I love my XBMC built, recent versions have been clunky and unstable. Competition is always good.
- camdykeman 13y agoCheck out Raspbmc. Its a rPi version of xbmc running on a custom kernel. The project is run by a student here in London, ON Canada. http://www.raspbmc.com/ http://www.raspbmc.com/
- bschwarz 13y agoI've tried Raspbmc and ran into all kinds of weird problems. As a result I installed Raspbian, added XBMC myself and have been happy ever since.
- synchronise 13y agoI tried Raspbmc but the buggy Airplay support forced me to switch to Xbian. Haven't bumped into a problem since.
- primo44 13y agoUh, no. Sam is in London, England. Well, somewhere in the UK anyway.
- camdykeman 13y ago
- sigkill 13y agoA python script allows you to enter the name of the show, scrubs it from a tv guide website and adds the release date of each episode into a scheduler. Then, the scheduler fires off and searches for each episode on a torrent aggregator (like torrentz or something) and downloads it from the best seed/leech ratio result. All without your intervention since torrent RSS is not very reliable in the public tracker scenario. What would be the legality of distributing that script? (depending on legality, I may or may not write or have already written such a script)
- subway 13y agoCheck out Sickbeard. It basically does exactly what you're describing, plus searches Usenet indexes.
- tossawaytoday 13y ago+1 for a Sickbeard setup. Been using it for a while with SABnzbd and it's great; I've got all the shows I want waiting whenever they air, or if I decide to download a full series.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y agoExact setup is how I watched the first few episodes of Game of Thrones, and opted to subscribe to HBO because of their sane streaming policy.
- ericd 13y agoIs it possible now to get HBO online without having to get cable TV?
- tossawaytoday 13y agoYeah, if you subscribe to HBO Go you get everything on HBO streaming. It's a good service from what I've used. Also comes bundled with the channel if you subscribe with cable.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y agoWhat I wouldn't give for a decent HDMI passthrough video setup for a better channel guide (on my own hardware)
- beagle3 13y agohttp://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=NeTV_Main_Page http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=NeTV_Main_Page $120 at Adafruit. Would you give that?
- cyansmoker 13y agoNice but in no way a Google TV.
- badfortrains 13y agoFun seeing what people do with their PIs. Really appreciate the time people put into documenting their projects. I've been running a custom mp3 media server[1] built around a similar stack (node,socket.io,express) and I was surprised how capable the pi is for this kind of thing. The only real slowdown I saw in my project was inserting/reading thousands of records from a sqlite3 db (displaying all tracks for example) and even that was solved pretty easily with some caching. My project is all running headless though, with presentation handled on the client (phone/desktop browser); I'd be curious how the chromium render speeds are for this. In my testing any kind of web browsing on the pi was pretty painful. [1]: https://github.com/badfortrains/wupnp https://github.com/badfortrains/wupnp my much more poorly documented raspberry pi project
- akeeble 13y agoHow is this Google TV? There's no HDMI passthrough, its just HTPC. It's a cool project nonetheless