Ok so I sort of fell of the face of the planet for the past 6 months and have not posted a thing. But allas, Im here. New job, no time... yadda yadda. Who cares.
Maybe it was because the pc-car project was complete. Everything worked... no more bugs. nothing left to do. Well it took a while, but I finally found a welcomed addition to my pc-car. TiVo.
I dont quite know where im going with the idea. but the basics are as follows :
For anyone that has no idea what im talking about go to
http://www.tivo.com and start reading. Tivo is like a VCR with a brain. I dont want to get to far off track, so we will just say its a box with 20-200 hours (depending on size) of your favorite TV.
The best part about Tivo ( ok well maybe not the best.... but still pretty cool) The heart of TiVo is a Linux based pc. Now before the windows people start to rant - have no fear all the good stuff is just plain mpeg video.
So far I have 4 ideas -
1. Make the tivo HD removeable, and simply drop it into the car after loading data.
Would need some work on the back end to mount the Tivo fs (Linux native) on to the car pc.
2. just buy 2 tivos. keep one in the car. This would be the easiest setup. I allready tried it pluged into an inverter and everything was fine.
3. You can ( with some work / hack / warenty voiding) add a Network card to the tivo. I have 802.11b from house to car. programs are allready written to run on the tvio and windows pc to extract the mpeg data. I could use Samba and mount the car as the output drive for the mpeg decode....
4. Some sort of transcoding to lower the quality of the video and make the file size smaller.. .then transfer to pc....
Some things to consider - we are talking about a lot of data. 8 hours of good looking video is about 20 GB. Tivo is picky about people messing with its fs. I have crashed mine a couple of times allready ( easy to restore a backup)
Annyone interested ?
Im boared... this sounds challenging... whos with me