NoRights Podcast: S3E25 - Talking PseudoTV Live!

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This week Ben leaves his underground bunker to tell us of his latest obsession: Configuring a media center. But first, Ian brings us this week’s headlines.

Drunk Guy Arrested After Impersonating a TSA Agent to Grope Women. New Captain America Will Be Black, Marvel Announces on Colbert. Here’s Why a Female Thor Makes Total Sense. Google may turn NYC phone booths into Wi-Fi hubs. ‘Simpsons World’ puts the full series online, but you’ll need cable to watch everything. Home Depot to sell the ultimate DIY hardware: 3D printers.

Assess your needs

Things you want to consider

Local storage
Streaming
High Definition

Do you want to use your current system or a dedicated machine?
Your decisions should be based on how granular you want to be about the project

Home Theater PC (HTPC)
Prebuilt -More work is done for you but your options may be limited and you pay for ease of use/convenience
Custom -More options and you can price hunt for deals but requires more thought and setup time
Set top box – Easiest choice but also the most limiting

Local storage

There are many ways you can store your media. Here are some options

Drobo – Redundant storage where you buy the system that meets your needs and fill it with however any drives you want
FreeNAS – Free and open source network-attached storage. Buy a system that runs it or build your own

Media Center Frontend

For our purposes we want to run XBMC
XBMC – Open Source Home Theater Software, runs on plenty of hardware efficiently, is open source and easy to customize, has iOS remote control app

Perhaps the simplest rig to put together would be assembling a Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi – Very customizable and educational, literally build it out from the circuit board how you want it
Running XBMC on Raspberry Pi

I went with an Ouya for my build
Ouya – Android Gaming Console, $99 geared towards people who want to tinker with Android apps/games
A version of XBMC made specifically for the Ouya is available free in it’s app store and you can also install other versions
Running XBMC on Ouya

My brother recently got one as well so he and I can swap notes on what works best

To Root or Not to Root

Rooting your Ouya gives you power to add and install things not available to normal users such as the Google Play Store however you could also screw things up with it so tread lightly
Rooting the Ouya tutorial

Apps

I recommend installing a couple apps to make things easier
1Mobile Market – for downloading apps
Chrome – because the browser app is rather bare bones
ES File Explorer – for copying/moving files around

PSeudoTV Live

This add-on for XBMC takes your local content, others from streaming sources, and live TV and puts it all into an Electronic Programming Guide. Based on another program, PseudoTV which dealt with local files.

You can build your own custom channels, complete with logo bugs and bumpers/commercials all based on what you want to see when you want to see it
Milkman’s Guide to the Ultimate Media System – forum thread with files and links
PDF of Milkman’s guide – A handy guide for setting up a system for your content to get scraped by XBMC and building channels in PSeudoTV Live

SMBUp – If you’re using a newer Mac and want to share your folders you can run into connection problems. This app deals with them nicely

Managing Youtube Playlists

YoutubePlaylist.net – Useful for copying and adding videos to playlists but be aware it uses a tokens system per file
Copy youtube playlists

Bonus 3d Printing Links from Ian

Filastruder – Make Cheap 3D Filament

Various DIY Printing Materials

Wood Filament