Build your own Google TV using Raspberry Pi, Node.js and Socket.io

http://blog.donaldderek.com/2013/06/build-your-own-google-tv-using-raspberrypi-nodejs-and-socket-io/

by DonaldDerek • 13 years ago

283 82 13 years ago

blog.donaldderek.com

emile8182• 13 years ago

Nice!

DonaldDerek12• 13 years ago

Thanks!

emile8182• 13 years ago

i will try it as soon as i have my rPi

bahman2000• 13 years ago

I just happen to have an extra rPi lying around. Thanks!

panzerboy• 13 years ago

This is awesome! Do you have any plans to continue working on this?

DonaldDerek12• 13 years ago

Sure thing! I'm really surprised of all the feedback, let's fork it guys! I believe in an open world.

Nux2• 13 years ago

I've already built myself a TV out of the Rpi, using OpenELEC+XBMC! Have a great remote, too in the form of the Yatse application.

I do appreciate the "hackerness" attempt of the article though, it goes to show why the Pi is so cool.

petepete• 13 years ago

Having tried just about every XBMC remote going (at least the ones I could find), Yatse is the best by a mile.

Luckily my TV works well with libCEC, so I don't need my phone/tablet every time.

Nux2• 13 years ago

CEC is great, sadly I only own a monitor, but I will definitely make sure my next TV set will be CEC-aware.

DonaldDerek12• 13 years ago

OpenELEC+XBMC! Nice :D is it on github ? would like to give it a shot

arianvanp• 13 years ago

repo: https://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv Install guide: http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=Building_and_Install...

tharshan092• 13 years ago

woah, this is really cool. How does this compare to XBMC on the raspmc distro? I am really tempted to try this out on my rpi because a lot of the software stack used could be hacked on easily.

DonaldDerek12• 13 years ago

Thanks! It's a totally different architecture, I'm using Raspbian and WebSockets, really hacked this in 4 days..

tharshan092• 13 years ago

Yes I understand that. I was just asking in terms of the features that it currently offers compared to XBMC?

ck2• 13 years ago

Just no netflix.

beshrkayali• 13 years ago

+1! Awesome work Donald!

DonaldDerek12• 13 years ago

Beshr :D Thanks bro!

esusatyo• 13 years ago

Somebody please pack this all together and sell it for $50. This is how Apple do business. Sell hardware and software together.

DonaldDerek12• 13 years ago

Ahh would love to... and make it open!

ern• 13 years ago

Somebody please pack this all together and sell it for $50. This is how Apple do business. Sell hardware and software together.

It's a very cool project for the technically savvy, but if you sell it to consumers, you'd have to provide support, something that could be time consuming. Or make it foolproof (Apple's strength).

I have a Raspbmc setup, and I get a fair amount of interest from visitors who are impressed, and want their own cheap media centers. I dissuade them, unless I am sure they can troubleshoot computer issues, SSH/SFTP, image an SD card, and know basic SQL.

DonaldDerek12• 13 years ago

That's true, but with some serious development things can be possible, after all you need a community to cover your back to compete with the big names, and our community is RaspberryPi, Linux, and the open Web...

buster3• 13 years ago

Just buy a raspberry pi + case for that amount of money and install openelec/raspbmc. I did that last week, it's a fantastic combination!

pyre• 13 years ago

I remember (maybe a year ago) people complaining about XMBC on RaspberryPI. Things like the menus being sluggish / having slight delays, maybe some issues with 1080p videos streaming over a network, etc. Have those been resolved?

Pxtl2• 13 years ago

There are a million Chinese companies making little ARM devices running Android 4 and selling them for about $50. Basically everybody's waiting for Google and bigger manufacturers to sit up and take notice and start supporting the platform (poor wake-on-USB behavior is a huge problem).

Dell is supposedly going to be the first one on the scene with a real brand-named "mini-PC" device.

epochwolf• 13 years ago

Buy a roku or Apple TV for $99?

throwaway1979• 13 years ago

This is cool but this is not Google TV. The article title is misleading. I have a hard time even calling it a version of Google TV.

mtgx• 13 years ago

When I read it I thought they were building a customized version of Google TV, which was strange because I don't remember Google announcing that they've open-sourced Google TV (btw, is Google even allowed to do that?)

DonaldDerek12• 13 years ago

This is just a proof of concept, hacked it over the weekend :)

fooqux• 13 years ago

Agreed. I originally clicked on it because I thought it might be a way to get Netflix working on my raspberrypi. I'm pretty sure I physically wilted in my chair when I saw it was nothing of the sort.

As others are saying, it's still a good hack though. And while just installing a custom distro meant for XBMC on your rpi might be easier, putting something like this together by hand is a much better experience.

davedx• 13 years ago

Great! I'm about to start on a freelance project writing web stuff for set-top boxes, nice to see what's out there in the open source world. Thanks for posting. :)

buster3• 13 years ago

Not Google TV. Not even close. Great work but what are the advantages over XBMC on the raspberry pi?

DonaldDerek12• 13 years ago

Thank you! It's just an experiment, I totally agree with you it's no way near a Google TV that thousands of engineer strive to put into production...

baggachipz6• 13 years ago

This really could be the start of something great. FWIW, here is what I think a media center should do, which no current solution achieves:

Have a DVR-like interface, where all content is combined. This means downloaded torrents (by new and/or watched), with meta info. Also include new streams from HuluFlix based on when they were made available. New shows recorded from antenna and maybe QAM. New movies from Crackle, etc. The point is, I should be able to tell the application that I want all new episodes of "The Simpsons" and it will use all available configured sources to find what I want. It will present this to me in one comprehensive list. The source is irrelevant and I don't want to start various apps to find what I want. Google TV sort of tried to do this and failed. As cool as XBMC and their ilk are, they suffer from not passing the "wife test" and feature bloat. This thing, in my mind, should be dead simple to use.

DonaldDerek12• 13 years ago

Thanks for sharing this awesome vision, I totally agree, the Open Web deserves an Open TV :)

snowpalmer• 13 years ago

Roku does a great job of combining sources however it doesn't support DVR or local storage (i.e. Downloads)

Boxee also did a great job of combining sources and did a good job with local storage. It also didn't support DVR.

To be honest DVR is an animal that I've seen nobody crack successfully.

baggachipz6• 13 years ago

See, here's the thing about Roku and competitors (like the WD box, etc): they all require you to start different "apps" to browse different sources of content. I don't care where the content comes from, I just want to watch it. So, when I say "DVR", what I mean is a DVR-like interface to combine all content from various sources.

icefox• 13 years ago

What about Tivo? Tivo does the DVR perfectly.

jasonbarnette• 13 years ago

I use a combination of mythroku (https://github.com/ear9mrn/MythRokuPlayer/tree/master/mythro...) and plex channels for playing local content on Roku.

laumars2• 13 years ago

when you have hundreds of albums and all your DVDs ripped, it's actually preferable to have your sources separated as it makes searching easier. Furthermore, I don't think it's hard to switch between music and videos on XBMC (since you mentioned the "wife test", my non-technical wife manages XBMC fine).

In fact the very reason I switched away from Boxee and Moovida back to vanilla XBMC was because I wanted a media player that separated my music and videos and respected my file system hierarchy.

However looking at the screenshots for this project, it looks like it separates music and video in the same way XBMC does. So I'm not really sure I understand your point.

baggachipz6• 13 years ago

Music is another beast; I'm focusing on video in my rant. Right now on (e.g.) a Roku, the process of finding a specific show to watch consists of opening several apps: check Netflix... Not there? Check Hulu... Not there? check YouTube. Not there? check NBC.com. Not there? check other stations' content sites. Not there? Check local storage. Not there? Check NAS. All I want is something to organize this into one DVR-like list. It can start the various necessary apps for viewing (not ideal, but I understand their commercial interest to keep their properties siloed). I am just sick of having to dig through every individual source to watch what I want. Furthermore, a good application would keep tabs on release date and watched status for me, like you'd expect from a DVR.

jawerty• 13 years ago

Great (sigh)....now I need to get myself a Raspberry Pi

germancito• 13 years ago

There is a commercial version of this running android http://www.rikomagic.co.uk/

vlasta2• 13 years ago

You should throw in a kinect sensor (or any alternative) and have a very comfortable remote control.

kayoone• 13 years ago

RPI has a very mature version of XBMC working on it, so you are much better off with that for your home media center.

BUT god this is a nice hacking project and i would love to see this being the start of an XBMC alternative open source project that is built upon web technology! Awesome!

DonaldDerek12• 13 years ago

Indeed! Thanks for your comment!

nivla• 13 years ago

I hope so too. As much as I love my XBMC built, recent versions have been clunky and unstable. Competition is always good.

camdykeman2• 13 years ago

Check out Raspbmc. Its a rPi version of xbmc running on a custom kernel.

The project is run by a student here in London, ON Canada.

http://www.raspbmc.com/

bschwarz• 13 years ago

I've tried Raspbmc and ran into all kinds of weird problems. As a result I installed Raspbian, added XBMC myself and have been happy ever since.

synchronise• 13 years ago

I tried Raspbmc but the buggy Airplay support forced me to switch to Xbian. Haven't bumped into a problem since.

primo44• 13 years ago

Uh, no. Sam is in London, England. Well, somewhere in the UK anyway.

sigkill2• 13 years ago

A python script allows you to enter the name of the show, scrubs it from a tv guide website and adds the release date of each episode into a scheduler. Then, the scheduler fires off and searches for each episode on a torrent aggregator (like torrentz or something) and downloads it from the best seed/leech ratio result. All without your intervention since torrent RSS is not very reliable in the public tracker scenario.

What would be the legality of distributing that script? (depending on legality, I may or may not write or have already written such a script)

subway• 13 years ago

Check out Sickbeard. It basically does exactly what you're describing, plus searches Usenet indexes.

tossawaytoday2• 13 years ago

+1 for a Sickbeard setup. Been using it for a while with SABnzbd and it's great; I've got all the shows I want waiting whenever they air, or if I decide to download a full series.

sigkill2• 13 years ago

Just a note to others checking out Sickbeard. It does not download the actual video clip. It only downloads a torrent (or in my case an nzb file) which needs to be further piped.

joshschreuder• 13 years ago

Sickbeard is for TV shows.

See also (with varying degrees of effectiveness), Headphones (music), Mylar (comics), and CouchPotato (movies)

ajtaylor• 13 years ago

Sickbeard + SABnzbd has been my go-to combination for months now. Sickbeard is regularly updated, and the integration between the two requires a small amount of initial configuration. From there, just make sure the 2 daemons are running and that's it.

samstave• 13 years ago

Please email me more information on this script so I may review it for legality/science.

mikewhy• 13 years ago

It can be done better than that.

https://github.com/mikew/ss-raspberry Extracted from http://mikew.github.io/ss-plex.bundle/

newman314• 13 years ago

showrss custom feed into utorrent. Works like a charm.

zimbatm• 13 years ago

And for the Mac: http://tvshowsapp.com/

ChikkaChiChi2• 13 years ago

What I wouldn't give for a decent HDMI passthrough video setup for a better channel guide (on my own hardware)

beagle3• 13 years ago

http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=NeTV_Main_Page

$120 at Adafruit. Would you give that?

cyansmoker• 13 years ago

Nice but in no way a Google TV.

badfortrains• 13 years ago

Fun seeing what people do with their PIs. Really appreciate the time people put into documenting their projects.

I've been running a custom mp3 media server[1] built around a similar stack (node,socket.io,express) and I was surprised how capable the pi is for this kind of thing. The only real slowdown I saw in my project was inserting/reading thousands of records from a sqlite3 db (displaying all tracks for example) and even that was solved pretty easily with some caching. My project is all running headless though, with presentation handled on the client (phone/desktop browser); I'd be curious how the chromium render speeds are for this. In my testing any kind of web browsing on the pi was pretty painful.

[1] https://github.com/badfortrains/wupnp my much more poorly documented raspberry pi project

akeeble• 13 years ago

How is this Google TV? There's no HDMI passthrough, its just HTPC. It's a cool project nonetheless

Build your own Google TV using Raspberry Pi, Node.js and Socket.io

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