[K12OSN] Retrieve DVD Player via Yum

[Steve Wright]

On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 07:15, Jim Kronebusch wrote:
> I thought I would quick give you guys an idea of what I was thinking
> with the DVD distribution from the server.  Right now our campus has a
> Dynacom/Safari Video Distribution system running from a head end with
> fiber to all classrooms.  Our workstations in the classroom have
> projectors hooked up with a program on each machine called Mac/Win
> Remote.  The head end has 6 DVD players and 30 VCR's along with some 12
> cable tuners a couple digital radio recievers and so on.  The teachers
> are able to select any input from the head end display it remotely on
> their projectors in the classroom or just simply listen to the radio
> feeds.  Movies are dropped off in a box in the morning and I program
> them up for access for whatever duration they want.  This is a pretty
> cool way to share a few resources from a central location to our
> buildings around campus and on the other end of town.  Downside is the
> system was installed with a Grant for about $500,000 in 1996 and is
> starting to fail without money to fix it.  

MythTV!!  MythTV!!  MythTV!!  MythTV!!  MythTV!!  

MythTV is a client-server system that plays DVDs, VCDs, (etc, other
video), Television, Music CDs, and is a Video Recorder (can record
programs of Television.)

You can assemble a number of DVD drives and TV Tuner cards in a "server"
and run "mythbackend" and then run the very tidy GUI "mythfrontend"
elsewhere.  This frontend is a completely integrated menu-driven system
that is basically a complete multimedia home-entertainment package.

You can also use diskless VIA EPIA M1000's to build remote
dhcpd/tftp-booting clients viz LTSP if you would like a dedicated unit.


> I thought this idea was a good start to figuring out how Linux could be
> used to provide a lower dollar solution to K12 or even Colleges.  I am
> not really thinking of using this locally in the same lab but more for a
> campus wide distribution (otherwise a local projector would be far
> better than sending to clients).  I don't know if you could build a box
> with multiple source inputs and let users select from them through a
> terminal and display them remotely or not with some sort of gui with
> dropdowns.  It just got the wheels turning.  Someone with far more
> knowledge than myself could probably make pretty good money if they
> could package such a system.

It's already done.  http://mythtv.org/