Open Pandora, two awesome weeks

[Linux-SWAT]

This post has been promoted to an article

 

[Blue Protoman]

Of all the praise I've seen, yours is the best-written.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Thx.


Took me hours ^^


I owe this to OP team and their dedication.

 

[guax]

I had some fun reading this.... so many links, I think I spent almost an hour

 

[ZXDunny]

Now i'll try to focus a little more. UI and kernel tweaking are a good start.

This. Not so much the kernel stuff and more the UI. I've spent the last few weeks getting my Pandora looking like Windows XP, and it's getting there. Shame we'll not get an Aero interface though!


D.

 

[cobrajs]

This. Not so much the kernel stuff and more the UI. I've spent the last few weeks getting my Pandora looking like Windows XP, and it's getting there. Shame we'll not get an Aero interface though!


D.

To each his own, I guess. To me, the window manager is just that stuff around the terminal. I'll probably end up putting a tiling WM on mine


Excellent review, by the way. I agree 100% with the whole thing. Well done!

 

[gruso]

Now i'll try to focus a little more. UI and kernel tweaking are a good start.

This. Not so much the kernel stuff and more the UI. I've spent the last few weeks getting my Pandora looking like Windows XP, and it's getting there. Shame we'll not get an Aero interface though!


D.

I'd love to see pics some time. If/when we get XFCE4.8 in an update, visual customisation should easier.

 

[Evil Star]

Of all the praise I've seen, yours is the best-written.

Thx.


Took me hours ^^


I owe this to OP team and their dedication.

:blink: :lol: :lol: :lol:


I nearly spat my tea all over my monitor at that, Blue Protoman is hilarious B)

 

[Konscript]

This thread... made my day. Excellent post!

 

[Blue Protoman]

Of all the praise I've seen, yours is the best-written.

Thx.


Took me hours ^^


I owe this to OP team and their dedication.

:blink: :lol: :lol: :lol:


I nearly spat my tea all over my monitor at that, Blue Protoman is hilarious B)

But...I was serious...

 

[- Theo -]

This is a great review, thanks!

 

[juliano]

Great review. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

 

[Norl]

Great review. As someone who's never seen linux before my pandora, it's great to read about getting every bit of functionality out of it.

 

[Valpskott]

I already turned my OP into a HD camera, plugging in a good Logitech 720p webcam.

Have you managed to record from the Webcam? Any command you could share?

 

[Linux-SWAT]

I recorded on SD with vlc, but although the rendering on-screen is pretty good, i had to lower the settings in order to proceed.


So the record quality isn't what i expected when i wrote this post. I didn't tried all possibities so there's a room for optimization.


I badly know vlc too


Maybe it may be better with a good USB hub and an USB key or a network share ?


The datarate of the webcam is a mystery.


From Wikipedia :

The original USB 1.0 defined data transfer rates of 1.5 Mbit/s "Low Speed" and 12 Mbit/s "Full Speed". The 12 Mbit/s data rate was intended for higher-speed devices such as disk drives, and the lower 1.5 Mbit/s rate for low data rate devices such as joysticks.

The USB 2.0 specification achieves 480 Mbit/s, a fortyfold increase over the original USB 1.1 specification.

I also though to have a filesystem using RAID between SD but i have to recompile a kernel to do so. I'll do it someday.


SD class 10 is 80 Mbit/s so with RAID we could tweak for more throughput.


Wifi g is 25 Mbit/s real.

 

[WizardStan]

VLC can display and record at the same time? Hmmm... I wonder if it's decoding the stream, then re-encoding it for writing, which would cause issue.

 

[DaMummy]

you guys are assholes for making me read a 3 month of thread

 

[Valpskott]

I recorded on SD with vlc, but although the rendering on-screen is pretty good, i had to lower the settings in order to proceed.


So the record quality isn't what i expected when i wrote this post. I didn't tried all possibities so there's a room for optimization.


I badly know vlc too


Maybe it may be better with a good USB hub and an USB key or a network share ?


The datarate of the webcam is a mystery.

I have a Logitech c910, which has a max of 1080p. So it might be similar to your Logitech 720p. And using it on my laptop I've noticed that any on-the-fly encoding often results in sync issues. But setting MJPEG as both input and output in guvcview works as a charm. So I figure that at least the C910 seem to encode MJPEG internaly... maybe yours does as well? So if there are any settings for it in VLC, try setting both Input and Output to MJPEG


A video I recorded in 864x480 30 fps (MJPEG) with audio encoding(MP3) 160 bps resulted in a 36 second video with the filesize of 60 mb. So that would average around 1700 kbs in total for both video and audio if my calculations are correct. Although, there wasn't much movement in that video. In the clip I was filming the screen of my pandora while it was on my desk, but with heavy movement it might be 3-4 times that datarate, which would still be in range of what a Class 10 card should be able to handle. In fact, I've recorded 1080p videos with a Canon 500D onto my Class 10 card without any problems(h264, datarate unknown at this time).


So both USB2.0 and Class 10 SD cards should be able to manage. My guess is that the bottleneck would be if one tries to encode to diffrent codec on the fly, where the processing-power of the Pandora will not be enough to keep up(without reducing the output quality).


Now if anyone would port guvcview to the Pandora I would be really happy.

 

[Nardella]

i said it was an _electronic device_, not a douchebag


epic

 

[Linux-SWAT]

@Valpskott :


Thx for sharing your tips, and indeed guvcview is neat.