Topic: Things stopping me from buying a chumby straight away

This device looks fantastic but I'm a little disappointed at the available widgets. Some basic things I'd expect to see aren't there so here's my list of functions I'd want in a Chumby before I buy one.

Play music from a network share
Slideshow photos from a network share, dealing intelligently with caching some of the big files you can get from 8MP cameras nowadays
Internet radio! This is a biggie and I don't know how this device thats an alarm clock didn't ship with this since virtually every regular clock has radio built in.

It would be really nice to be able to stream video too but given the hardware I'll just have to be happy with youtube probably.

If chumby did those 3 things I'd buy one now for Christmas but until then I'll be holding on waiting for the functionality.

Re: Things stopping me from buying a chumby straight away

* Play music from a network share
- I agree, people will wonder why the heck it does not work. Ideally the Chumby should work with plain old CIFS shares, but even better support some standard media-server software (just like the PS3 and XBOX 360 use http://www.rbgrn.net/blog/2007/06/how-t … x-360.html )

* Slideshow photos from a network share, dealing intelligently with caching some of the big files you can get from 8MP cameras nowadays
- Yes, but where to store the big data? The answer is that there needs to be bigger local storage (e.g. SD-card) or some kind of media-server which can transcode the image to the small chumby screen.

* Internet radio
- Yep, once Chumby supports internet radio I will be a customer. This is #1 on my wishlist.

Re: Things stopping me from buying a chumby straight away

Fruitloaf wrote:

Slideshow photos from a network share, dealing intelligently with caching some of the big files you can get from 8MP cameras nowadays

Unless you want to pane the photo around, the screen on the Chumby is only 320x240 which means the image is likely to be resized to 1/25th its original size.  Photo resizing should be doable on the device, so it could pull in the big image, resize it and cache it temporarily.

4 (edited by dwatson 2007-11-07 21:53:21)

Re: Things stopping me from buying a chumby straight away

salimfadhley wrote:

* Play music from a network share
- I agree, people will wonder why the heck it does not work. Ideally the Chumby should work with plain old CIFS shares, but even better support some standard media-server software (just like the PS3 and XBOX 360 use http://www.rbgrn.net/blog/2007/06/how-t … x-360.html )

* Slideshow photos from a network share, dealing intelligently with caching some of the big files you can get from 8MP cameras nowadays
- Yes, but where to store the big data? The answer is that there needs to be bigger local storage (e.g. SD-card) or some kind of media-server which can transcode the image to the small chumby screen.

* Internet radio
- Yep, once Chumby supports internet radio I will be a customer. This is #1 on my wishlist.

You can already play music from a network share with the chumby. I posted a thread in the software section on how to do so.

As far as photos from a network share, that isn't a possibility yet, since there are no widgets to put photos on the screen (that I know of), except for the flickr one. But, the functionality is there since you can mount a Windows share.

Internet radio works. You can use streaming audio through btplay. I've had my Chumby play an Internet radio station for hours without issue.

Caveat though: You have to ssh into the chumby and run things from the command line to get these things to work. Until widgets are made to interact with their command line counterparts, you can't run these things through the touchscreen interface just yet. If you are okay with Linux and the command line, you'll be right at home with the chumby though.