wraggster
November 20th, 2006, 02:09
Heres an excerpt:
The video player died in our minivan a few weeks ago, sending my kids into a death spiral of Wiggles withdrawal. In retrospect, it would probably have been better never to have the video player, but it seduced us with the promise of hypnotically transfixed children who would never again ask, "Are we there yet?" I had to have it back, only better. So I built a video server for the minivan.
What I wanted for the van was the equivalent of what we had already working at home, where MythTV running on a $300 Linux box stores every episode of Arthur, Dora the Explorer, Dragon Tales, Rolie Polie Olie, Cyberchase (my son Channing's favorite), Jimmy Neutron (my favorite), and many other programs -- more than 500 shows in all. It's squeaky-clean content in every sense, including the best of all -- no peanut butter fingerprints. I just had to find a way to move this capability to the car for almost no money.
My output device of choice was the Sony PlayStation Portable or PSP -- a handheld game system with a widescreen LCD that plays movies beautifully. We had one, thanks to a grandmother who had no idea that two-year-olds don't get such things for their birthdays, and when they do get them they try to flush them down the toilet.
Full Article (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20061116_001214.html)
The video player died in our minivan a few weeks ago, sending my kids into a death spiral of Wiggles withdrawal. In retrospect, it would probably have been better never to have the video player, but it seduced us with the promise of hypnotically transfixed children who would never again ask, "Are we there yet?" I had to have it back, only better. So I built a video server for the minivan.
What I wanted for the van was the equivalent of what we had already working at home, where MythTV running on a $300 Linux box stores every episode of Arthur, Dora the Explorer, Dragon Tales, Rolie Polie Olie, Cyberchase (my son Channing's favorite), Jimmy Neutron (my favorite), and many other programs -- more than 500 shows in all. It's squeaky-clean content in every sense, including the best of all -- no peanut butter fingerprints. I just had to find a way to move this capability to the car for almost no money.
My output device of choice was the Sony PlayStation Portable or PSP -- a handheld game system with a widescreen LCD that plays movies beautifully. We had one, thanks to a grandmother who had no idea that two-year-olds don't get such things for their birthdays, and when they do get them they try to flush them down the toilet.
Full Article (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20061116_001214.html)