Guix Home Entertainment SoC Media Server?

Guix Home Entertainment SoC Media Server?

[Blake Shaw]

Hiya Guix!

I just got a TV and want to put together a little SoC home media server for
it (perhaps with beaglebone black, as that appears to be the recommended
SoC for Guix). Has anyone had any experience with this? Thoughts?
I figure it could be a fun use of `Guix Deploy`, but I've never put
together a SoC media server before, so I'm not sure what packages to
peek at, or what "out of the box" (re: raspbian etc) options are
available.

Seems like this could be some cool shoes for Guix to fill!

ez,
blake

Re: Guix Home Entertainment SoC Media Server?

[Edouard Klein]

Hi !

It depends on how easy and integrated you want your experience to be ;)

The raspberry pi is classic SoC to use for such a purpose, there are a
lot of software and guides that you can use and take inspiration from
for your project.

In particular, the Retro-pi project will let you play classic games on a
raspberry pi, and Kodi is a nice integrated media center distribution.

Sadly:
- the raspberry pi still uses some proprietary components that GNU Guix
can not take into account (yet ?)
- some features, especially games, are closed-source, so outside of the
scope of GNU Guix.

My advice would be to look at what people are doing on raspberry pies,
and replicate what you need.

From a purely function over form perspective, I think you can replicate
90% of the features of Kodi with VLC. It can do streaming, can read any
media format, and is globally awesome.

Also take a look at https://gitlab.com/guix-gaming-channels/games for
(sadly closed source, but what can you do ?) integrating video games in
your Guix setup.

Please post somewhere about what you do, this is an itch I intend to
scratch someday and I'll be happy to read about your efforts,

Happy hacking :)

Edouard.

Blake Shaw <blake@nonconstructivism.com> writes:

> Hiya Guix!
>
> I just got a TV and want to put together a little SoC home media server for
> it (perhaps with beaglebone black, as that appears to be the recommended
> SoC for Guix). Has anyone had any experience with this? Thoughts?
> I figure it could be a fun use of `Guix Deploy`, but I've never put
> together a SoC media server before, so I'm not sure what packages to
> peek at, or what "out of the box" (re: raspbian etc) options are
> available.
>
> Seems like this could be some cool shoes for Guix to fill!
>
> ez,
> blake

Re: Guix Home Entertainment SoC Media Server?

[Blake Shaw]

Edouard Klein <edou@rdklein.fr> writes:

thanks Edouard! I will definitely update this thread with my progress :) 
-- 
“In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni”

Re: Guix Home Entertainment SoC Media Server?

[Leo Famulari]

On Fri, Jan 07, 2022 at 04:06:56PM +0700, Blake Shaw wrote:
> I just got a TV and want to put together a little SoC home media server for
> it (perhaps with beaglebone black, as that appears to be the recommended
> SoC for Guix). Has anyone had any experience with this? Thoughts?
> I figure it could be a fun use of `Guix Deploy`, but I've never put
> together a SoC media server before, so I'm not sure what packages to
> peek at, or what "out of the box" (re: raspbian etc) options are
> available.

I think this would be a great project for Guix. It's something that Guix
should be really good at, once all the wrinkles are ironed out.

Although the BeagleBone Black is a very nice computer in many way, I do
recommend against it for Guix System because our build farm support for
its CPU architecture (armhf) is currently sub-par. And the BBB's CPU is
optimized for low-power use, so building packages on it will be slow.

I would search for a 64-bit ARM computer. That is, the "aarch64" CPU
architecture. We have better build farm support and it will probably
continue to improve.

Re: Guix Home Entertainment SoC Media Server?

[phodina]

Hi Blake,

> Hiya Guix!
>
> I just got a TV and want to put together a little SoC home media server for
>
> it (perhaps with beaglebone black, as that appears to be the recommended
>
> SoC for Guix). Has anyone had any experience with this? Thoughts?
>
> I figure it could be a fun use of `Guix Deploy`, but I've never put
>
> together a SoC media server before, so I'm not sure what packages to
>
> peek at, or what "out of the box" (re: raspbian etc) options are
>
> available.
>
> Seems like this could be some cool shoes for Guix to fill!
>
> ez,
>
> blake

I'd probably recommend something like Raspberry Pi. The latest iteration is quite powerful and you can run Kodi there.

There's a patch pending to support this fruit board in Guix :-)

Patches to install guix system on Raspberry Pi [1]

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-patches/2021-06/msg01228.html

----
Petr