If you are interested in being a mentor for Google's summer of Code 2010, please send me an email (jborn at neurostechnology dot com). The application deadline is Friday, Mar 12, so the deadline is basically here, and I'm filling out the application as we speak.

The focus of this summer's work is likely to be the Neuros LINK but there's no reason if you are interested in doing something with the OSD or OSD2.0 that wouldn't be appropriate. We're not going to be touching anything with the OSD3 yet or things that are too close to the hardware, we've learned our lesson from that nightmare in '08 with getting students emulators, etc. Any applicant (mentor or student) accepted will get a free device, which they can keep once the summer is over.

Here's an initial Ideas page to give you some idea of the types of projects we're thinking of.

On November 17, JP Saman, perhaps the top VLC maintainer, will be giving a lightning talk at ETechDays and answering questions about VLC on the OSD2. See the lightning talk page for more information.

Of course, you can regularly find jpsaman on the #neuros IRC channel too if you have questions. The DaVinci 6446 is a great little processor and the OSD2 should become a replacement for the OSD1 as the framework issues get resolved. There are lots of products in the market based off the 6446 processor and it will continue to have a place in TI's line for some time to come. There's even support for flash 9 on the chip. So, if you don't need full HD (1080p) support, consider looking into the DaVinci chip and the OSD2 for your applications/projects.

A big thanks to Andrey A. Porodko for submitting a couple recent patches that could get the OSD2 kernel merged with the mainline. For those that don't know what this means, it basically means the OSD2 code would be something that's inherently more current, something that the community would maintain along with the rest of their progress, rather than leaving it behind (as is the case with most traditional embedded devices).

We are looking for a telephone-agent, who has special interest in web applications. This is a position that may be a full-time employment. We are looking for someone who can satisfy the following requirements:

speaking english and german fluently.

Suchmaschinenoptimierung: www.reknova.de
aram moturu optimizasyonu: www.reknova.com

This Thursday Night (US Time) We are resuming our beloved "Breakfast with the Chairman" series of fireside IRC chats. It's breakfast because it's Friday morning in Xiamen China where Gao was. Now, that was probably confusing to many when Gao was actually hosting the meeting, now that it's being hosted by westerners, it's just plain impossible to understand. But I just can't resist posting that picture of the chicken feet, and I'd have no excuse whatsoever if we lost the "Chinese Breakfast" theme

In any case, it's Thursday, Mar 5th @ 6pm CST , or UTC Mar 6 @ 00:00 Click Here to find your local time.

During this weekly meeting, the Nero, Crweb and MattJ will patiently answer your questions about hacking the Neuros LINK, no matter how stupid, ignorant or inane they may be. It's been a while since we've had one of these meetings, and it's also special because I've invited some actual product users from the gasp outside world through a heavily promoted campaign (I posted on the forums) to discuss the LINK from the perspective of someone actually connecting it to a television set and trying to watch videos on it; Now these folks may not know the Kernel of Linux from the Colonel Sanders, but they have cold hard cash we're trying to pry out of their fingers to buy the LINK and/or to tell their friends to do the same

Agenda:
1. Talk about priorities of users, issues they are having and importance of various bugs and enhancements
2. Talk about what we'd like to see hackers doing and experimenting with on the system
3. Talk about big decisions on the horizon, what we're researching for various components, media players, etc.


#neuros regulars: This money mentioned above will allow us to finance the "bounties" for these ingenious "hacks" I've been hearing so much about.  I will try to portray you as these brilliant, skilled hackers, please don't blow it and look like  psychopathic  nincompoops (at least until we get their money)

As most of you know, the LINK started out life as what we call a "TVPC," namely a disc-less, quiet computer that's configured specifically for bringing Internet video to the tv. From that foundation, it's rapidly evolving to provide a more seamless couch experience. One area that's receiving a lot of attention is the controller.

Recently, we've been spending some time prototyping with motion sensing controllers, including the Nintendo wii controller. The significant thing about this kind of interface is that it allows an easy way to have both standard menu navigation (up down left right) as well as free form mouse control, which is still needed for web browsing. There's even a virtual keyboard
(which we certainly won't use in production). Posted a quick youtube video of it in action. For those of you that want to play along at home, you can follow the instructions below.

If you don't have a LINK, but would like to try out the software (you'll have to apply the mods below manually) you can booting your PC from a flash drive with the software, instructions here No guarantees, it's meant for the LINK, but I have heard reports of some folks getting it working fine on other PCs.

More good news from TI. From the open platforms principal architect:

"TI is continuing to make our devices more and more open. In addition to the low-cost C64x+ DSP tools, open source DSP Link, and open source Codec Engine, plus configuration tool, the DM6446 VICP is now usable by everyone via the VICP Signal Processing Library

The VICP is a collection of loosely coupled accelerators attached to the C64x+ DSP within the DM6446. The VICP signal processing library provides a simple way of programming these accelerators to provide additional DSP performance within your system. "

If you are wondering why this is big news, its because these tools allow outside developers unprecedented access to the power of TI's DSP, essentially unlocking the power of a chip that's has a price performance ratio that few others can match. The Davinci 6446 chip is about the size of a dime, can do real time high definition video encoding, has such low power consumption it can operate without even a heat sink and using battery power. These chips essentially are bringing laptop type performance to handhelds (or silent set-top devices). For more information, see my youtube intro of the OSD2 dev kit.

For discussion, see the mailing list thread and TI's community site

Building on the promise of the Neuros OSD, the high definition Neuros OSD 2.0 developer kits, developed in collaboration with Texas Instruments (TI) is now on sale at the Neuros Store . The goal of the OSD2 is to do to the TV what the IBM PC (and the like) did to computers, namely to provide an open set-top device for TV applications. Simply put, without an open computing device, there would have been no PC killer apps. Without an open video recorder, there can be no TV killer apps.

The OSD2 is an open video recorder that's capable of high def video recording from virtually any source and playback in a variety of formats. Using TI's DaVinci DM 6446 chipset, the Neuros OSD 2.0 will offer the first truly open embedded video recording device. “TI's support for this initiative represents a significant milestone, not just for Open Internet Television Platforms, but open electronics generally,” said Mark Denissen, vice president, Worldwide Strategic Marketing, Texas Instruments .

If you're like me, your first reaction to hearing that the web is available on your TV is "why?" The answer is quite a bit different than you might think. The answer is not that you want you want your TV to go out to the web to browse content, which is by and large not the most inspiring concept. The answer is that you want web content brought to your TV. In other words, the Web and all the interactive web 2.0 tools are tools that are well suited to bring rich content to your TV.

Ravenexus Summer of Code project is a great example. Check out this video capture of it in action and you'll quickly understand that the point of the web browser is not "browsing the web" per se, but as a tool that allows all kinds of participation in an integrated TV experience that hasn't existed before. Wiki information populating information about shows and artists is just the beginning. Links to shared favorities, community feedback, etc are all vastly more realistic when the tools to bring them are webtools rather than the typically embedded morass.

Neuros hacker Guillaumebel has been hard at work on integrating last.fm and he's been diligently documenting his progress on the last.fm wiki page. Here are instructions to try the Beta. Besides the fact that I'm personally a big fan of the last.fm service, two things really excite me about this application. As the tag line suggests, last.fm really is a quiet revolution in the way that we experience music. Virtually anyone that's used last.fm knows it's a vastly more compelling way to listen to music than traditional fm or even satellite radio. It's interactive, learns what you like, enables music sharing, is powered by fellow users, and ad free. It represents another break from the traditional centralized taste-makers and further increases the power of us listeners, and it provides real protection against some of corrupting influences of money in the industry. Its long been a great pc application, but in need of support on a device to bring it to more living rooms.

The second thing that's exciting about this application is how it beautifully illustrates the power of free/open source software integrating new functionality in a device. Look at item five on the Xi menu as an example, it's a feature that will search and fetch the associated music video from YouTube (or some other online video source). In the future, you can imagine that the customizable Xi menu could search your local collection and other services for "music from this artist" as well as share that music with friends, etc. The simple Xi menu is the result of many contributions, from many projects, XMMS2, a youtube browser, etc. What's key is all that functionality is seamlessly integrated into one familiar media playing interface, meaning it allows one handed operation and works with the simplicity users expect of their electronics.