Are There Open Source Receivers for Firefly?

[HalNineThousand]

I’ve just recently found out about media servers. (I’ve never had time to look into it before.) I know Firefly works with Roku products, but I’m curious if that’s all that it works with. Are there any open hardware/open source firmware projects out there to work with Firefly? I would think, with all the different embedded hardware out there that someone would be working on a project for an open receiver that could be created from a list of hardware components that runs on open source.

Does anyone know of such projects?

[fizze]

Chances are slim to none, since firefly relies on the DAAP (iTunes) protocol, which needs to be licensed.
As for the RSP client part, I am quite certain that RoKu would pursue similiar goals, or at least put their code under LGPL or BSD-Style-License….. 🙁

Anyhow, as Firefly is plugin-extendebla, it surely would be a sweet project.
AD Blackfin eval boards are rather cheap, and giving lots of power. They only lack a display, but thats not the hard part to glue some logic and a screen to these things.

[HalNineThousand]

Is RSP another protocol Firefly uses?

[sansp00]

Yup,
Presently, it’s supports DAAP, RSP and UPnP discovery (no streaming).

Patrick S.

[mas]

Well, there are software opensource libraries for DAAP and also some software players support it. Mostly for linux though. For windumb only GIT (rudimentary java player thing) does (unless you count commercial stuff).

So in principle there wouldnt be a problem – if there WERE any hackable hardware player. I’m simply not aware of any hardware soundplayer where one can freely replace the firmware with a linux clone. If there were it would be doable. So find a way to built a soundcard into a NSLU, then its no problem…

[HalNineThousand]

Actually, I was looking at a project where someone took a Linksys router, put OpenWRT on it, added a USB sound card and used it to receive streaming audio. I was thinking of doing something similar. He used an LCD display to show the track info, but for me, I don’t think I’d need that.

At this point, what I’m considering, is using a few dumb clients like that with a server that would stream one thing to all and using a PDA to control the stream to them.

[fizze]

Well, then check out the Linksys NSLU2 😉

nslu2-linux.org gives a couple of nice ideas. audio player is just one of them. 😉

So you could have one NSLU2 that streams off music from another NSLU2…. err… right 😀

[rpedde]

@HalNineThousand wrote:

Actually, I was looking at a project where someone took a Linksys router, put OpenWRT on it, added a USB sound card and used it to receive streaming audio. I was thinking of doing something similar. He used an LCD display to show the track info, but for me, I don’t think I’d need that.

At this point, what I’m considering, is using a few dumb clients like that with a server that would stream one thing to all and using a PDA to control the stream to them.

Do check the NLSU2 project. The whole reason I commited the oggdec tremor package was someone was doing that exact thing — using the slug as a usb-audio player and needed it to decode ogg in realtime.

Openslug is a good “bare-bones” distro, if you want to start with something exceptionally slim. If you want better functionality and more pre-built packages, look toward unslung.

— Ron

[Author]

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