May 03, 2007
My TV Runs Linux
I picked up my brand new Pioneer Elite PRO-1140HD yesterday. As I don't have many movies and Comcast hasn't come by with my CableCard yet, I was desperately looking for some high quality content to view. One of the features of the Pioneer Elite televisions is a media server client that allows you to stream multimedia (music, pictures, and video) from compatible devices via ethernet. The directions said the built-in server with Windows Media Player 11 works, so following the path of least resistance, I rebooted into Windows and downloaded some content from the WMV HD Content Showcase. While some movies were downloading, I got a pop-up stating that a media client has connected to the network. How cool is that!
Anyway, I just had to put the HD videos in the "My Videos" folder in Windows, fire up the media client on the TV, and click on the icon for the video. Within a few seconds, my TV was playing back 1080P content without any noticeable image problems. Actually, the image quality was absolutely jaw-dropping!
Today, I started playing around with things a bit more. I fired up a packet sniffer and started looking at traffic. The first thing I noticed was SSDP (related to UPnP). Also, the TV is running Linux 2.4.22. How cool is that? And, thanks to the GPL, you can download source for all the tools used on the TV.
What interests me about the TV running Linux is that it knows how to play content with DRM, specifically WMV 10, which can't play on Linux. Now, this either means there is a proprietary Linux driver available, or the decoding happens on my computer and content is streamed DRM-less. Time to fire up the packet sniffer.
Finally, do any readers out there know if there is a free Linux-based server that is DLNA compliant? As cool as DLNA is, I will have to express my disapproval that they require you to pay a fee to download the interoperability guidelines. Even if you choke up the $500 download fee, you have to agree to a license stating you won't share the content therein to others who have not purchased the guidelines. So much for encouraging adoption among freelancers. Sadly, any kind of reverse engineering done via packet sniffing is probably prohibited by the DMCA as well. Ugh. I want to tinker!
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