The story of my experiences with the ADS Medialink left off in my last post with an excellent solution for streaming music with a 100 line ruby script. The problem remained, though, of how to stream video. The Medialink didn't like straight avi's served from the Webrick server, and casualy presents the most unhelpful error messages ("Out of memory") when you attempt to watch a movie this way. Seeing no obvious reason for why this would be, I kept searching for more information on the device.
It turns out that the ADS Medialink is outstandingly obscure, and is barely mentioned on its manufacturer's website at all. But in my search I came across a number of similar devices which all seemed to have the same features and this "Syabas middleware". This, apparently, is the software that runs on the Medialink and many other similar devices. Syabas created this software with fairly complex capabilities, and left manufacturing the actual devices to a handful of electronics companies. A somewhat odd strategy I must say, and certainly the cause of much of my confusion when trying to find information on the software, but once you realized that all these devices are the same they become much easier to deal with.
So with this issue sorted out, it becomes fairly clear that all I needed was software that supports these Syabas-middleware based devices. The first one of these I found for Linux was called wizd, so I pulled it from cvs (they don't seem to have actual releases put together), fixed a few build problems, and let it run. Streamed a movie to my TV just perfectly. Now if only the computer in my room at school was running, so I could download a movie from it to watch ...
——cs
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