Friday, March 23, 2007

The XaniX Trinity.

Hey every, I probably haven't explained this to you guys yet but there is somewhat of a confusion amongst people with he whole XaniX/ OpenXaniX / Xenion Os thing. Well, I figured I'd take this time to do some explaining.

It all started back in the day.
I figured one day (after being very frustrated with Linux and decided that I would make a operating system that was as simple as Mac OSX but free and open source and start a community, and thus the openXaniX project began way back 2 years ago.

Well, soon after this, someone introduced me to a guy named Dawid Manczak, then everything changed.

I told him this Idea and he say, for every dollar you put in you should get two dollars out. Well, I said that was stupid and just blew it off. Though the more I though about it the more I realized it was true. What was the point of making an operating system and get nothing back from it. Then dave and I were joking around about making a game system, then I became serious about wanting to be know. Thats when The 'open' was dropped and the project became XaniX.

Anyway, how it works is like this. OpenXaniX may live again since people are interested in hacking the Xenion and therefore openXaniX Would be the best way for them. and Xenion OS is just XaniX with the Xenion MCE software installed.

So there you have it folks.
TTYL,
Michael

Thursday, March 22, 2007

From XeMC Concepts

Ok This is the last one for today promise XD
One feature that you guys have to consider is multi unit viewing (see bottom of image above)

Well you know how I was saying we'd use XConnect (We'll decide on a name later) would be able to stream media back and forth? Well, we should implement a way to share media between devices, therefore, we can implement multi-room viewing.
How would this work?

Well, imagine for a second, that someone puts a TV tuner in there main Xenion.
Then they go upstairs to there room were they have another Xenion. Wouldn't it make sense to have a way that they could watch post-recorded tv and other media on this Xenion instead of bringing there main one up every night?

That how microsoft does it. It cost 1299 and up for a media center and 250 and up for an extender (which lets you do what it says above) for that price, one could get a souped up Xenion and what.. 3 or 4 normal ones to use as extenders. plus one winrar for us right? Since we don't resell hard drives (or its not part of the plan so far) it makes sense that we sell as many units and as much useful software as possible right?

Also, if you look in the album this picture came from (click the link on the bottom right corner) the last picture shows the LinuxMCE modules section. I think that is how the software installation should work, it it a nice layout.

Anyway for the last time, comment
TTYL,
Michael


By the way, take a look at the MythTV feature list and speculate on some stuff we should integrate into the our software, I want the first release to 'drop teh pwnage' out of the box. so look at it and write some comments, either here, on a page, or both (preferable)

If you have time, please watch the first couple of minutes of this video, since this is essentially a crappy version of our idea.

So go
Hey Guys,
I know I just poster like ten minutes ago but anyway,
we need to get some publicity going and soon. We have the capacity to start being a little more public and making some friends.

Seriously, we are farther back then we need to be. If we make some friends, meet more frequently and start talking to different people (that are useful, not so much people who want to buy the system) we can be a little better off in this project.

Anyway, JR I would like to hear your opinion on how to 'make some friends' since we need to talk to some small conpanies that can provide us with cheaper parts, for post and pre- production of the Xenion. Also, there is a group, Team Black bolt that makes some pretty amazing skins for XBMC. I'd love to get them to do the GUI stuff for us (other than the skins we will do ourselves, we will need a few) and therefore we should approach them.

Anyway like always, leave your comments so that we can get our discussion going.
Talk to guys later
Michael.

Oh and BTW, the site will be up shortly, it will be Melenia.org and I'm working to make the site just like the Xenion GUI for consistency. Shout out to kitu who doesn't want anyone to know he is secretly working on this
From XeMC Concepts

Ok Guys,
Here is the latest concept, this is the one that we are going with for the default skin,

This design is nearly perfect, give me a little while and I'll render the media bars top and bottom, I should have that done by this evening and update this post.
Otherwise, there will be text under each icon, although the original idea was to have no words to make it a little more 'international' (wrong word but w/e). The reason the text isn't in the picture is I need to set up a OpenGL effect to animate the words (slide up then reflect like the image above it). The other thing to expect is a better media bar at the bottom and top, and a little circle underneath each icon that is in the middle to make it appear like a spot light.

Ok so now do you guys understand what I want in the main skin? The skin gallery is up so you should take a look at see what you like from it, look often I'll probably add at least one concept per week.

Well, anyway we will meet soon don't worry, and this time COMMENT YOU PUNKS >:(
That way, while we aren't together on messenger or in real life we can see what other have to say and reply and be a community. (click the comment thing at the end of this post)

Talk to you later,
Michael

Sunday, March 18, 2007



Hey guys,
Not too much new stuff to report. We are moving forward with the XConnect System, we will probably give it the ability to stream video to the Xenion too. This will be especially useful for users of PC-based media center systems, since in theory this would allow people to use the Xenion something like a Sling Box.

While on the subject of streaming TV, just so you know, IPTV will be discussed at the next meeting as part of our infrastructure discussion. (Matt, I want to hear you novel idea at the next meeting.)

If you didn't notice, the image above has nothing to do with anything.
Have a good one,
Michael

Thursday, March 01, 2007

From Melenia Devel...


Hello everyone!
We're just motoring along aren't we?
Last night marked the internal release of the Xenion SDK, this mourning marks the internal release of the Xenion Web Browser (Screen shot is running in an emulated environment with GLUT BTW).

Anyway, the browser is based of the gecko rendering engine (used by Firefox) so it has nearly the same compatibility as Firefox (if not better :P)

As you see in the screen shot, the image can be rendered in different shapes and sizes (however, this feature is currently locked on the real Xenion hardware u_u')

Not too much else to report. although I think the next release will be a screen cap of the Xenion GUI or maybe a feature list or maybe even a walkthrough of X Connect o.0 I don't know.

So like always we'd love yo hear your feedback so make sure to leave comments


-Michael

Edit: Forgot the picture (-_-)'