Wolfgang Reutz's Blog

iTheater

iTheater Projectpage

Pros:

• freeware OpenSource / GPL open for extensions

Cons:

• only Release Candidate not finished yet

MediaCentral

MediaCentral Projectpage

Pros:

• freeware supports EyeTV
• closest Userfeeling to FrontRow supports ATI Remote and Salling Clicker supports access to Bonjour shared Libraries from iTunes / iPhoto

Cons:

• UI not very maclike, not as beautiful as FrontRow

mMedia

mMedia Homepage

Pros:

• freeware supports EyeTV easy skinnable supports Internet radios, tv viewing via EyeTV more features than FrontRow in general

Cons:

• haven’t tried it yet

CenterStage

CenterStage Homepage

Pros:

• freeware OpenSource built in XCode and Obj C very extendable lot of Extensions (planned) very promising

Cons:

• not finished only a few features implemented yet

not free: FrontRow

Pros:

• preinstalled on new macs easy remote control tight integration into iLife and the OS

Cons:

• only on selected Apple hardware no extensions / limited features

Dependencies

get and install libxml2

download sources for libxml2 and libxslt from http://xmlsoft.org/downloads.html
build and install

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./configure --with-python=/<pathtoyourpythonbinary>/python
make
sudo make install

Install kaa

first get kaa from svn:

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svn co svn://svn.freevo.org/kaa/trunk kaa

i had to disable the building of the shared memory module on OS X because it wouldn’t build. As it seems kaa.metadata works without the shared memory module, but maybe someone knows how to get this built on OS X with the shm module.
go into kaa/base and edit setup.py by changing (line 36) this

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extensions.append( Extension('shmmodule', ['src/extensions/shmmodule.c']) )

to this

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#extensions.append( Extension('shmmodule', ['src/extensions/shmmodule.c']) )

until now the support for cdrom drives only works on Linux, so i disabled it on OS X.
now go to kaa/metadata and edit setup.py:
change this

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ext_modules = [ cdrom, ifoparser ]

to

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#ext_modules = [ cdrom, ifoparser ]
ext_modules = [ ifoparser ]

and change this

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ext_modules = [ cdrom ]

to

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#ext_modules = [ cdrom ]
ext_modules = [ ]

now go back to kaa/base and install the kaa.base package:

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sudo python setup.py install

now go to kaa/metadata and install the kaa.metadata package:

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sudo python setup.py install

you may use a different python instance, like /opt/python24/bin/python or something else if you don’t wanna install kaa into the default python on OS X.

I just followed a link from a plone product (Speechcast 0.01) to the webpage of the MARY text to speech project at http://mary.dfki.de/. This is a very promising project that aims to build a open source text-to-speech system, based on a JAVA server client system with the ability to build webbased services. I was completely surprised how well this works. The first few voices i tried were just like the normal “robots”.

But if you like to hear how text-to-speech works nowadays then head over to http://mary.dfki.de/online-demos/java-interface (you need java 1.5 web plugin) and select one of these voices:

• time-awb (English, male, limited)
• dfki-zeit (German, female, limited)
• dfki-bundesliga-excited (German, male, limited)
• dfki-bundesliga (German, male, limited)

i never heard such emotional computer generated voices – that’s the right way! Imagine what this could do for blind people or how you could generate automatically podcasts from your texts or how you convert a book for studying on your ipod

I always had the problem, that i could resize (drag with my mouse) images inside kupu, but when i save the document the image has its original size

Today i found the solution to this problem here

To enable kupu to keep the resize information upon save you have to add width and height to the style whitelist in the kupu preferences in your site preferences. Your styles whitelist should look like this:

text-align
list-style-type
float
width
height

that did the trick and now resizing images is working