LinuxBIOS and your TV? (was: motherboard for vdr system)

[Alessio Sangalli]

Preston L. Bannister wrote:
 > This is way too cool :).
 >
 >   http://www.cadsoft.de/people/kls/vdr
 >
 > The fact this is built from off-the-shelf components is *very* 
interesting.

Ja and it's not a geek toy, my mother and father use that too!


 > Click the remote to turn on your TV (and the attached computer) and the
 > first thing you see is the LinuxBIOS boot message.  Microsoft would be
 > delighted :).

eheh I think it's not so easy because the tv is not connected to the vga
card but to a DVB card, with mpeg2 hardware decoding. You should
initialize drivers, upload the firmware to the DVBcards and send an mpeg
I-frame with linuxbios logo directly from the routines in the flash
memory. A bit overkill!

 > The set-top box that came from my cable TV company is slow, and the
 > interface poorly designed.  Innovation is slow to non-existant.  It's bad
 > enough I'd considered ditching the service.

For vdr there are many plugins (not included in the core distribution,
so you won't read it on that website) that allow to display (sx)vcd,
dvd, divx, images, listen to mp3, etc etc

 > Fast boot is desirable.  Booting Linux from flash would be nice but not
 > essential, given you would have a hard disk.  You'd be looking to 
boot from
 > CD (for software reload) or hard disk.

Ja, a hard disk is needed (or you'll loose a very important feature of
vdr, such as automatic recording of television, time shifting, etc) so I
was initially thinking to use it for the 'system' anyway.

However, to save noise, heat, and all, a flash could be used for the
system keeping the hdd powered off, and spin it up only when you wanna
record-replay.

Which kind of flash memories are avaiable? the system itself is not so
big, but I'm not aware of the common sizes of that kind of memory.


 > Maybe the questions Alessio could have better asked would be:
 >
 >   Which BIOS/boot loader would be most suitable?
 >
 > and then:
 >
 >   Which suitable small motherboard is supported and readily available?
 >
 >
 > ( I too was unclear Alessio was asking :).

ja sorry for the silly english I speak, but I always speak it with non
native people and sometimes we create our own grammatics and use
invented words. too bad!

bye!
as