Freevo/Freevix - Day one

Travis Roy travis at scootz.net
Sat Aug 9 10:18:53 EDT 2003


> If you check out freevix, I would like to here how it
> worked out


Okay! Well, it took me probably 5 hours to get from downloading to 
actually get it working. If I had more of a clue I probably would have 
had it working sooner.

1st problem was that I made the decision to do the network boot without 
really knowing how network booting works :) That ate up a huge amount 
of time. Once I got that figured out things went rather smoothly to get 
it to boot and mess around with it. The interface is great. The TV 
Guide thing looks very cool but right now it still had no data in it 
and that's not really a priority for me yet since I'm going to use my 
TiVo for TV watching and this for movies/music.

Another thing that slowed me down was that you have to rebuild the root 
filesystem for the netboot every time you make a change and some config 
files are in different places and you have to change the right one. 
Most stuff hangs out in /etc/freevix/

The interface is kind of odd, but I'm using a normal keyboard for now, 
not a remote control. MP3 playback is great on my EPIA 800. I had a 
South Park episode laying around to try video playback, the quality of 
the AVI wasn't the best and it showed on the TV, but a high quality 
DiVX rip should look great. The controls change a bit when playing a 
movie +/- for volume when playing a MP3, but it changes to audio delay 
when playing a movie. I'll have to mess with that.

Another problem was that it's suppose to automount CDs and let you 
browse them, but I couldn't get that to work at all. It showed the CD 
and the name of the CD but it would not let me browse it. I also 
haven't tried ripping CDs and archiving them since all my CDs are 
already archived to MP3 thanks to iTunes :)

Menu navigation was slow for me, but I think I can speed it up since 
the config is still pointing to directories that are not there.

Now that I'm done the "get it to f*cking work" stage I can tweak it a 
bit. I'm going on vacation tomorrow so I probably won't mess with it 
much until I get back.




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