I went to a friend's place last night and watched a movie with his newly built entertainment center. The main working horse of his entertainment center is a PC running ppstream. I have known for a long time that ppstream is a very popular p2p media streaming client with huge amount of content in China. He can choose any channel and watch movie in ppstream and project them using a projector. What's surprised me is the quality of the movie. It looks like HD quality, maybe 480/720p. It's not bad when it is projected to a big screen. The network experience is smooth, no lagging or any noticeable artifacts for one and half hours. Maybe this is due to the movie we watched is a quite hot one recently with a lot of seeds available.
Although I am not a big fan of ppstream, as it stupidly requires Chinese version of Windows to be installed, the simplicity and smooth network performance did impress me. As an embedded engineer, I thought that it would be interesting to come up with a simple box wrapped the ppstream or other kind of media player and sell them to North American Chinese community. But the OS has to be Windows. All you need is just a network cable and you can go watching thousands of Tv programs and movies online. However, the content is not legally provided by content providers. So, I have no idea how can you sell those kind of product in NA. Maybe to port ppstream to some other platform, say arm, is not a bad idea if the source is available. I just found that ppstream does provide a Linux version using mplayer as the player. Let me give it a shot.
3 comments:
The ppstream downloaded from its website supports Ubuntu 8.04 version. However, I am using the 9.10 version now. I tried to run the pre-built mplayer and it can't find the libXvMC although I have it in my /lib directory. But I am using the 64-bit and it asks for 32-bit version.
They do provide a patch file of Mplayer 1.0rc2 to support pps:// protocol. But all their libraries have only binary version with source code. I can't rebuild the Mplayer to support the pps, as the libraries are not compatible. It sucks. They really should release the source code. It's against the GPL license, I believe.
I thought of the same idea a while ago but products like this are already available in China. PPS released program designed for the chipset (I beleive Realtek) which is widely used on media player products.
Yes. I just figured out that there is a lot of product based on the Realtek 1073 chip is available in China.
http://article.pchome.net/content-1006216.html
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