2000-2010
The Golden Age of
The Home Theater PC
(HTPC)
While the consumer was contemplating between ReplayTV and TiVo, us hobbyists were building our personal video recorders with Microsoft Windows Media Center or MythTV.
Image from Raptor Computing Sys via twitter.
HTPC Case
A better HTPC
HTPCs were in the living room and had to look cool. Ahanix made some amazing cases, and Soundgraph had superb universal remote controls and vacuum fluorescent displays.
Infrared Remote and Display
- The trouble: no support for either if you were using Linux.
My turn to contribute!
Hacking
I purchased a remote control unit and hacked the protocol it was using over USB and started writing a Linux driver extension. Encouraged by the MythTV community I also picked up a VFD display and modified an existing LCD dispay driver.
LIRC
The Linux Infrared Remote Contro (LIRC) project had developed a framework for IR remote drivers so I refactored my code and submitted the plugin source and configuration files. It is now in the mainline Linux kernel.
LCDproc
LCDproc is an open source project that enabes control of a wide variety of LCD and other displays in Linux. I submitted my code for the iMON VFD device here.
MythTV & iMON
The MythTV wiki has a page on iMON support with my contributions!
© Venky Raju, All Rights Reserved.