Chris Metcalf has built a digital picture frame out of an old laptop. Very cool. I’ve heard about people doing this before, and thought it was cool (in a, well, heavily spod sort of way), but it’s triggered off a thought or two. Somewhere on my list is a telly in the bedroom; I wonder whether I should do this instead? I’ve got a Toshiba Tecra 520 here: it’s only a P166, and I don’t use it much. However, pretty much anything should be able to watch telly with a hardware TV card, no? PLus, it can be a picture all the time that it isn’t being a TV. This would be startlingly cool. I’m not sure that the laptop’s up to the challenge: what I really need is to get hold of a PCMCIA hardware TV tuner card (without, y‘know, paying £200 for it) and check it out. This would be a pretty neat Christmas present. I shall ask Jon at work: he knows about this kind of thing. I’ll bang a noddy Debian install on it and then freevo, perhaps. It’s only got a 12.1” LCD screen, but then it’s a bedroom TV so that’s not too unacceptable. Interesting idea.
I really need a “projects” category here so I can put all these cool ideas in it.
On I wrote Digital pictures frames, on the subject of Uncategorized.
Chris
Dave Farquhar
I thought I read somewhere that 700 MHz is about the minimum for video encoding with Freevo. But a P166 with a hardware card ought to make a fine TV. A 12.1 inch LCD gives more viewing space than a 13 inch CRT television.
sil
Ah, I’m not going to encode on it. I’m well aware that it’s not up to the challenge there. Instead, I’ll make it a mythtv front end, and have the back-end server do the actual recording, if such a thing is possible…
A P166 might be a bit slow for anything other than live TV watching. The Celeron 466 in mine is hardly powerful enough to play video well, and I’d never subject it to encoding.
But to display pictures and play MP3’s? It works great.