This week's edition (June 7 '08) of The Economist features a story about open source hardware and talks about Neuros, Chumby, Bug labs and all the usual subjects. A lot of it may not seem new or surprising to the readers of this blog, but between this article and the New York Times article earlier this year, open source hardware is getting a real boost. The Economist is a highly influential magazine, and a detailed introduction to the concept of open source hardware is sure to pique the interest of numerous executives, and it's the cumulative effect of stories like this that allow open companies to get funding, to find partners and customers, so we're delighted to see more of this coverage, in what we hope will become an increasing trend.

Chester Bateman from the Grassroots Learning Project at Oregon State University Just did a podcast interview with me about open and community based innovation. We talked about how open innovation works and our experiences with the community, etc. You can find the mp3 file here

Many of you may remember Turran for his Neuros Kernel Porting Work on the OSD. I am extremely proud to announce that Turran will officially become a full time paid employee of Neuros on June 5!

Turran joins Nerochiaro and CRWeb as volunteer hackers that have turned to the dark side and become paid employees. We hope that the continued recruiting of community members to Neuros will continue to build tighter bonds with the community and grow it to new heights.

Turran, thanks for your enthusiasm and support for Neuros, we are glad to have you aboard.

Now that the VLC port to Neuros Linux has kicked off a weekly meeting has been scheduled at 10:00 AM on Thursday mornings CST (15:00 UTC). You can see the log for today's meeting and we always welcome new participants. Thanks to JP Saman and the other VLC hackers that have offered to participate in this effort. If you are interested in getting involved, make sure you've registered to be notified about the beta release of the hardware

In a joint effort, Neuros Technology and M2X will, as part of the TI-Neuros Open Source Bounties , port VLC to Neuros Linux on the next generation of Neuros OSD solution. The VLC porting project was kicked off on May 28, 2008, with developers directly from VLC community. Jean-Paul Saman, one of the VLC maintainers, will be leading this porting effort.

Aiming to get an efficient and powerful multimedia framework on its Linux based Open Internet Television HD Platform, a highly optimized multimedia platform based on Davinci ARM-DSP dual core system, Neuros has chosen to use VLC among many other alternatives due to its extensive multimedia functionality, openness, and portability.

The role of VLC in Neuros HDPlatform architecture is to be the playback and encoding engine for all multimedia contents. For codecs, VLC uses plugins to carry out its video decoding/encoding on DSP, while all audio operations are done on ARM side. For Audio/Video I/O, VLC interfaces with the system by directly working with its standard Linux A/V system, for example, frame buffer for video output and V4L2 for video capturing. On application side, VLC implements MPRIS specification and exposes a DBUS interface thus to cleanly separate the multimedia core from applications.

This porting will be based on VLC stable version 0.8.6g (in fact, porting starts with 0.8.6-bugfix, a branch that includes some bugfixes for 0.8.6g since it was released), porting will be carried out in phases, from basic multimedia platform bring up, to full playback and full recording support, with complete system integration done in Q3 of 2008.

As 'open' itself states, all VLC source code files, new or modified during the porting, will be submitted to the central source code repository of the VideoLAN team, under the same license GPLV2 as the rest of the VLC source code.

Porting open, patent free codecs to our devices has always been of great interest to neuros and many of our users. As some of you Neuros old timers may recall, we were the first to port the Ogg Vorbis audio codec to a portable HDD audio player. Now it's time, hopefully, to do the same with the Ogg Theora video codec. This project is exciting to me, not just because it will allow us to support another codec, but because will put hackers directly in contact with technical resources and personnel at TI. Marcello Guedes is actually being mentored by a TI engineer, Jason Kridner and supported by TI with equipment, etc. If we can be successful in this project, I believe it will only further open TI's eyes about the potential and effectiveness of community development.

See the evolving theora wiki page for more information.

This is pretty self explanatory, and pretty cool. If you don't know last.fm then click on the link and check it out. It's a really cool social way to experience music based on a personal recommendation system based on people with like tastes. It's hard to fully appreciate until you've experienced it, and as far as I know, the OSD would be the first device outside of the PC to support it, so this could be an opportunity to bring social interactive radio to the couch so to speak.

We have a last.fm project wiki page thanks to Guillaumebel and thanks Anders for mentoring. Make us proud, I know there are many in the Neuros community that are very much hoping the OSD can become a great net audio streaming device.

Standing on the shoulders of Neuros Giant srobertson is another exciting project sponsored from our friends at Google, the nTube! Browser by Fcheslack and mentored by our own crweb

This is a really significant project IMHO, because browsing internet video is a really rich area for Neuros and creating an API that can really open up that world to a set-top box, is right in the sweet spot of what Neuros is focused on. It's great project, and one I personally hope to participate in (primarily by standing around asking idiotic questions that everyone rolls their eyes at- it's my special skill)

Google officially approved 4 project slots for Neuros this year.
The final projects list can be found at:
the neuros google summer of code page

I'm going to post about each of them here, starting with the web browser:
You've heard mention of a web browser here before, but now it's an official Google Summer of Code project, awarded to Ravenexus and it has a wiki page

Press Release: For release April 21, 2008

Neuros, in partnership with Texas Instruments, is pleased to announce the creation of a new bounty program for its Open Internet Television HDPlatform. Patterned off Neuros’ previous successes with community bounties and the Google Summer of Code Program, TI and Neuros have partnered to support the free software developer community with a six month phased program that will release a host of bounties to build and optimize this new platform.