What u could do is use a regular computer with a tv-card and stream over wifi (i like windows media encoder for that ). You ll need to run software like vlc (video lan client) compiled for arm to watch the stream. I think it is possible too to stream in the flash video format with software like Adobe Flash Media Server. And view this with any flash player (but i got to look into that option)

There's actually a hack that can stream music from your PC, if you happen to use SlimServer (which is free).  All you need to do is figure out the IP of the server, then use the "stream.mp3" interface.  From then on you can manage the music from a browser.

Basically, you'd create a USB flash drive with the following text in the file "debugchumby".

#!/bin/sh
btplay http://ip.of.your.server:9000/stream.mp3

Then boot your chumby with it.  I've done this a couple of times - it works pretty well.

Duane, what extension should be used on that file?
I have slimserver running.  I have created a file called debugchumby.txt on a usb flash drive, with the code you listed above.
#!/bin/sh
btplay http://xxx.xxx.xx.x:9000/stream.mp3

The IP address is the IP of the laptop that slimserver is running on.  I then place the USB drive in the chumby and reboot.  Slimserver can't find the player.

Is this all correct?  If so, it's not working.

OK, one thing I guess I need to mention is that the file must have UNIX-style line endings (linefeeds, not carriage returns), so you can't use, say, Notepad on Windows to create the file.  I know it's a pain in the ass, but that's the way Linux works.  There are some Windows text editors out there that will do this right, and Mac users can simply use the normal TextEdit.

Also, the name of the file should be 'debugchumby' with no extension (ie no '.txt').

If you get it running, you'll find that the system will appear to stop the boot process and widgets won't play.  In order to have it continue after launching btplay, put an '&' at the end of that line, and the system should continue normally.

At that point, you can consider yourself a 1337 h4xx0r.

It worked.
Woot

:-)

Seriously though, thanks a lot for taking time to help me out on this, it's an awesome "feature", plus, it makes me feel like I actually have control over the device.  Pretty cool.

Done

Here's another easter egg to help make that easier.

The chumby has a small program on it that can scan your USB dongle for MP3 files and output XML that can be used to build a playlist or some sort of Flash UI.

We don't talk about it much at the moment, mainly because in the current release (build 312) it has a small bug where the XML closing tag doesn't match the opening tag - so use at your own risk.

Effectively, issuing the command:

# mp3.x mp3://usb

..will output something like:

<mp3_masterlist generator="mp3.x" ver="0.19" dirs="0" files="1">
<mp3 artistname="Sonny Rhodes" songname="Firefly Main Theme" genre="12" track="PP" album="" comment="" year="0" size="786560">mp3://usb/alarm1.mp3</mp3>
</mp3_masterlst>

This particular USB dongle only has a single MP3 file, but you can see how this might be useful (and I'm sure you can see the XML bug if you look carefully).  A competent shell scripter could probably use this info to build a simple list of file paths that can be fed to btplay.

Duane,

  thanks for the tip!  what would I need to use to either display the XML or convert it to flash?

Justin

Duane,
   thanks, yes I could do that, in fact I probably don't need the mp3.x file I could just parse the filenames.   I got excited when you talked about swf and xml because I thought it would display something on the screen.

You've sparked me up again to play with the chumby some more.  I got kinda bored with it since it wasn't doing the things I really wanted like play music.

Regards,

Justin

I'm not a flash programmer.   I can write perl scripts.  I don't want to pay $700 for Flash Pro either.

I want a UI, but have no way to get it done.  I asked for someone to make a simple XML based(or text file) menu button to call scripts, but so far no takers.  I saw a bunch of this kinda stuff on Flashden, however, it appears I would need to compile them myself. (need $700 software).

This kinda put a halt to my hacking.  Cause I don't want to give up all the other nice features of chumby and replace with perl scripts and ssh.

Thanks,

Justin

*Gasp*
I...I'm mentioned
Yes, I've been working getting GTK+ working on it, so I can use applications that I normally use on my linux desktop. (Or at least lighter-weight builds of said apps)
VNC is fun to use. Although the delay, at least for me (I'm on the edge of our wireless network), is too great to use it with GIMP/Photoshop to draw. It is very similar, yet small...
I looked into Xfce, which is probably one of the nicest low-spec desktop enviorment (as seen in Xubuntu), and although the chumby should be able to run it, it would only run it just barely. You'd be able to run the DE, but no other programs I might look into trying fluxbox, though.

Another project that I'm working on actually fits in great with this discussion. I'm basically making a radio program for the chumby. The frontend on the chumby is done in flash. It connects to my server which has a database of my music. It randomly picks a song based on ratings, then uses Ming to wrap the .mp3 in a .swf, which the chumby loads and plays.
Its not something that I'm going to upload to chumby.com and make public, simply because it is too hard to implement on the end-user's end. They would have to set up the server and whatnot.

I will, release the source. However, I'm using Python as my server backend, and python is fairly obscure when it comes to servers.

Duane, that KJS/Cairo chumbyscript seems interesting. I've never used Cairo, I might look into that.