OST-Box : Open set-top box

OST-Box aims to be a full featured media center program.
It's goal is to give you access to all kind of media (TV, EPG, music and photos collections, videos, ...), using only a single remote.

Features

Photos

Ostbox include a photo album browser, with slide-show, thumb view, zoom/rotation capability. It can use an external tool to view videos (mplayer is pre-configured by default)

Music

The music browser let you play any file supported by xinelib.
It also has support for using existing playlist and also to create/save new ones.

TV viewing

OST-Box can be used to watch TV. You can decide to use its own internal viewer, or an external tool (mplayer, ...)
EPG can imported from xmltv file, and browsed with full program description. OST-Box alos includes a nice channel selector popup, which can also display current program name and advancement
When using the internal viewer, OSD are displayed over the video, with alpha blending.

Recording support

OST-Box includes a record scheduler.
It has two interfaces :

The direct one where you enter manually the time of the programm, its duration, its channel, ... It is available from the "recorder" menu. This is also the place where you can view recorded show.
The other way to program the recorder is from the TV program guide. In this case, you just have to select the program and click the "record" key. A new schedule will be created and the TV guide will show you that the program will be recorded.

The recorder is a separate process from the user interface. It is started when ost-box starts, but it will continue to run after you exit ost-box. So it is possible to record TV while ost-box is not running.
Finally, OST-Box cooperate with the recorder in a nice way : If you have only one tuner, it is possible to watch a channel while it is recorded. In case you have two (or more!) tuners, ost-box will directly choose the unused tuner when switching to other channel.

External tools

The main menu can be modified to include your own external tools (for example to play a DVD)

Various

OST-Box has a complete configuration menu. Almost everything can be configured within it, excepted TV configuration.
Control from one or more lirc remote. OST-Box now includes a setup menu for this purpose.
LIRC filtering. OST-Box can workaround bad signal reception with some remote
OST-box has multiple language support. Currently, english, french, russian and spanish are available. It is really easy to add a new language. Have a look into src/interface/ostbox-i18n-*.xml if you want to help !
Xml TV program browsing

It will (soon) have the following functionnality :

TV recorder programmation
Mouse support
Play movies, dvd (currently supported via mplayer...)

You can have a look at the TODO page to see what will come next. If you have ideas or you feel that something is missing there, feel free to post to the mailing list ost-box-devel@lists.sourceforge.net. If you want to see what it looks like, have a look at screen shots!

Design

OST-Box has an open design : The program itself is mainly a xml/javascript browser written in C++ and using mozilla speedermonkey and libxml. Also, most content is provided via small perl scripts, which are easier to tune to your needs.

Xml introduce a distinction between the interface and the code
Javascript is a powerfull language when it comes to write lots of simple functionnality.
Perl is very usefull to gather all kind of information (MP3 titles, TV program, detect system configuration, grab meteo, ...)

Internals

OST-Box is a C++ project. Internaly, it is divided into three modules :

A javascript/xml framework (js-reflection) which rely on the excellent spidermonkey javascript engine from mozilla, and libxml2. It makes C++ classes usable from javascript code and xml definitions. I am working on it for two years and i think it is now pretty reliable.
A graphic library (hid) providing widgets and threaded I/O routine. It relies on SDL, xinelib, sqlite3 (for thumbs and config) and lirc (for remote !)
OSTBox by itself which is 95% XML/Javascript

OST-Box needs your ideas and contributions... For any bugs/wishes/comments/contributions, leave a message on the forums... Alternatively, you use the ost-box mailing list.