Pablo Averbuj

Galleon fun

Here’s a google oddity. Google for “galleon” , a few results down, it will give you results for “Galleon Tivo”. Not sure why it does that, since I haven’t seen similar results at any other point in time. I digress.

After I got the TiVo happily onto the lan, I resumed poking around with the TiVo HME stuff. On their site I found a link to Galleon as a very popular HME app. I downloaded it and was very impressed with it. It reads the iTunes data file in as a source for serving music (it has other modes, like reading raw directories). This provided a much simpler and more maintanable solution than the iTunes/TiVoServer proxy I had hacked together. It gives access to content I hadn’t been making available previously, such as podcasts. The UI for the galleon config leaves something to be desired, but isn’t too painful once you get the idea. Some of the apps I really like are the weather, the movie listings, and RSS reader.

If someone with some UI sense would give the config UI a good whack, I think it’d be a really compelling use of HME. I also found AudioFaucet interesting as well. I had to file some support requests because I couldn’t get it working right at first but Kyle was very quick answering my questions. I had moved my iTunes library and AudioFaucet expects to find it in the ‘MyMusic’ folder.

The Anna Show

The grandparents want a way to “visit” with Anna. I was originally going to do it with a cheap webcam, but Leigha got me a nice digital camcorder for Christmas. So I figured, why not give them good quality video?

I consulted with my streaming video guru, Eric, and he suggested Windows Media Encoder. This caused about as much hesitation as you probably think. It turns out WME is free, and it’s freaking awesome. I also tried to toe the company line on this one. I wanted to use NSV to stream the video and I wanted the viewers to use WinAMP. I figured that’d be a nice, free, open-source way to get this accomplished. The problem is that not a whole many people are doing this, especially not using a windows desktop (there seemed to be *SOME* documentation for doing this on Linux). So after a few failed attempts with NSVCap/Icecast/Winamp, I decided to go with path of least resistance.

The only downside to the WME solution is that I’m limited to five connections/viewers. This is probably reasonably close to the amount of bandwidth I can push anyway. So anything above 5 viewers and I’ll need to find some Windows Media Server out there that’s willing to let me stream 30-60 minutes of live video to handful of people once a week.

If you haven’t played with WME, give it a shot. The UI is fairly good, but broadcasting is a fairly complex operation, so it’s pretty close to as good as it could be. If you play with it for a while, you’ll definately feel like you’re a hotshot live TV producer.