Hacked MediaMVP a disruptive technology? At least, so says Cringely...

That's a nice, kind of philosophical article on the MediaMVP. As a non-native speaker, I wonder, what is "disruptive" about the MVP or the old Napster. Disrupting what?

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but it won't be long before this little guy is working with Linux and Macintosh computers, too.

I take the opportunity of this new international forum to tell the English speaking world, that the MVP has been working at least with Linux for a while, by means of the vdr MEDIAMVP-Plugin.

-kobi

People have been playing with these for a while now. I know they have altered the boot roms so it come up in Linux and they get control (I guess they have compiled a basic Linux OS to work the machine).
As far as I know they have not got to the stage where it will run apps yet - probably due to the drivers for the graphics / network etc. But it is being worked on.

This is better (size wise) than the same project that took over the Microsoft X-Boxes a while ago and booted them into Linux. You can get a few different things to run on an Xbox now (including VDR of course)

[Edit] I've just had another look round and there are two different projects working on this.
This version turns your main vdr pc into a server and the MVP box connects to it and shows the pictures that way.
There is another project called mvpdevice which compiles vdr to work under a mini cut down linux version and puts that on the box so you have a full system (I guess you still need another pc for the storage / DVB card etc)

There's 3 different ways of interfacing vdr to the mvp:

- "mediamvp" plugin. This works with the standard Hauppauge dongle.bin code and forwards a set of menus to the MVP. These menus are not the standard VDR ones.

- "mvpdevice" plugin. There's a couple of versions of this knocking around the place. Both run natively on the MVP - i.e. vdr runs on the MVP. To be blunt it sucks - there's not enough memory onboard to enable the EPG to be transferred, the menu is a tad slow to draw, sync gets lost eventually. Channel 4 never displays etc.

- "mvp" plugin. This is a throwaway bundled with the "mediamvp" plugin. It acts as an output device for vdr. i.e. the true vdr menus (and themes etc) are transferred to the MVP and displayed. It works with the standard Hauppauge dongle.bin.. For a two hour hack it's not too bad though it's can't handle recordings and the OSD is not blended.

If the weather turns nasty again I might get a chance to write an alternate program to the Hauppauge onboard software so that it handles an alpha-blended OSD.

The MVP options looks like the best one to me.
What do you mean by " it can't handle recordings" ?
Does it not play them at all or does it get broken up ?

Well, recordings come through at about 100x speed! So I guess they do work, they're just not watchable!

I'm always keen to play with new boxes. Mine is ordered and should be here tomorrow.
I'll let you know how I get on with it.