Sep 282009
And not just HULU, anything that you can dynamically transcode and serve on the network, you can watch or listen to on the Z2. 30 rock on the Zipit Z2? Oh YES THANKS. Instructions after the jump.
Though this has been possible from the first image posted, I only today finally sat down and set it all up. Essentially, you are going to transcode audio or video on the fly to the Z2 using a windows or linux computer.
- First, setup your transcoder machine. For the most part this is beyond the scope of this guide, but I’ll give a windows example
- For the windows users, I recommend TVersity. It’s free to try for as long as you like, and they are really good to their customers
- Setup your data sources, In TVersity add your HULU/youtube username (for your online video queues) and any audio/video folders you wish
- Now setup the transcoder, for TVersity set the maximum video and image size to be 320×240. In the general settings, set your playback device to be mpeg1/2 device, and set the port for the web interface (and if you’re really lazy, set your port to be 80)
- On your trancoding machine, obtain the ip address (ipconfig (windows) / ifconfig(linux)
- If you want to stream your files over the net, forward incoming connections to the ip/port combination above on your external router
- Now, on the Z2 create a script with the following contents
#/bin/sh mplayer -vo fbdev -vf rotate=2 -bandwidth 100000 %1 - This tells mplayer to rotate the framebuffer (who wants the overhead of X11 or flux…) 90 degrees ccw (non-flipped) and limit the bandwidth to 100k
- Connect your zipit to your wireless network, and use dillo or links etc to browse to the ip address of your server
- Browse to the audio or video file you wish to watch, and copy that shortcut (or output to file). You may want to just wget/grep for the shortcut if you are comfortable on the command line
- Pass the shortcut (or paste it into a script, etc) into the script you created earlier.
- Voila! Streaming Audio/Video etc on the Z2 in great quality! Bet you didn’t think it’d do that eh? If you’re feeling adventurous, you can set the link handler for dillo or fennec to open the script and be fully GUI
You are the man!!!! Great work!
I think you are responsible for Zipits being sold out in every online store lol
Luckily I bought one before Amazon updated to “Item not in stock”
This looks great!
I just picked up a z2 at target fro 25.00 [on clearance]
Now Im looking for a step by step guide on modding this thing.
I do have a question, whats size memory cards will it take? 1-2 gig? 4 gig?
Man, that sounds great Hunter. I’ll have to set that up tonight, it’ll be great having my cable streamed to my Zipit as I wander around the house
mcavity, 1gb should be fine, though I’d recommend 2gb+ if you plan on putting any video/audio on the zipit
If anyone has an interest in it, I remade the keymap for the current version of xmodmap today. The mouse emulator overrides it right now, but with it Aliosa27 could just slim the mouse emu to cover mouse movement hardware utilities, and not have to do out the whole keymap again.
Can anyone post an example of the script used to connect to a wpa protected wireless access point. Some basic instructions or an example would be greatly appreciated, I have my image on my zipit but can’t figure out how to get on the network.
has anyone put together a list of working apps yet?
nice. vlc can also be used on the desktop.
I picked up one at target for $26 too after seeing the previous video… I followed the steps last night and things are working, although the lack of a pipe “|” key has been frustrating to say the least. Along the same lines, is there any easy way to reboot this sucker when it freezes up short of removing the battery?
Has anybody tried the debian image yet? I only noticed it was there after I flashed the original kernel mentioned over the factory firmware…
also is there any irc channel either Aliosa27 or hunter hangs out at?
Hey Jim,
This is how I connect to a non-protected network, just these 2 lines (my wireless is CapsuleCorp). I have not tried password protected net but it should be similar.
iwconfig eth0 essid CapsuleCorp
ifconfig eht0 192.168.0.16 netmask 255.255.255.0
Oh and one other thing… the page that explains the bit about the proprietary firmware left me wondering what I should do/move/run script, so a detailed procedure for this thing and not a generic one would be helpful.
Hey Cprossu,
What I do is make my own reset button. The little indentation on the side works as a reset switch, just cut off the end of a paperclip , put it in the hole so it sticks out 1cm, then cover it with tape. Makes a nice little button reset. Check #zipit on freenode, that’s where sweetlilmre and aliosa27 hang out. I don’t get on IRC much myself, email or comments threads
Hey Cprossu.
For the wifi firmware, it’s pretty easy. Under the image, there are stub files in /lib/firmware/libertas/. Just download the firmware files linked at SF (or copy the ones the flasher script made) as root, over the stub ones in /lib/firmware/libertas/*, keeping the same names and overwriting the stubs. That’s that.
Thanks for the reply!
I’ll give that a go as soon as I have a little bit of time! (in about 20 minutes)
There are new images uploaded to svn on the openzipit sourceforge page that do not require knowing anything about linux to set up, You can download some diskimages, and write those directly to a card, take it out and put it back in your computer, then you can directly drag the firmware to a partition windows/osx/ can see ,,,easy as pie now
Hi I live in Germany and have an APO Box went to the zipit2 site and see they sell it for 49.99 and want a one year service plan so no way for me. Was wondering how someone in Europe might get one. Also there is no contact information for you anywhere on the site so I thought I would post.
Thanks, worked like a charm!
is there any way to get to use the”alt+” keys under x? (the alt key just acts like the alt key under x (but not in the base os) right at this moment)
mcavity: I have an 8GB SDHC card (actually a microSD in a micro-to-mini adapter) in mine. Works great.
Jim SP: I’m using a WPA2 network, thus:
1) In /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf, I have something like:
network={
ssid=”MySSID”
scan_ssid=1
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk=”My very secret passphrase goes here.”
}
(IMPORTANT: I have commented out the eapol_version and ap_scan lines from the original wpa_supplicant.conf.)
2) Run the supplicant:
wpa_supplicant -Dwext -ieth0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
You should see some messages saying it associated. Suspend it with ^Z then background it with “bg”. (The control key is the one up and left of ALT, with the elipsis in white and the [X] in red.)
3) Run the DHCP client:
udhcpc
That should get you a DHCP lease; for me, the default route and DNS settings worked out of the box.
Douglas – Thanks, I will try later when I have some time. Think I may need to reimage card. I jumped on inital debain image and eth0 is not being recognized as valid device. I plan to switch to 2nd debain image or go back to Aliosa27 image from previous post. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Hey John Wesley,
Not sure how’d you’d get one in Germany. The 10$/mo is only if you wish to use the stock firmware, otherwise you just pay the 50$. Comments or any email going to hunterdavis.com will get to me. Hope you can find somebody who can ship one to ya
John Wesley Pruitt: i’m trying to set up sending a batch to europe (maybe canada too if i can workout the logistics and shipping etc.) as Zipit don’t have a reseller/distributor there and can’t really do it.
i’ve sent you an email about it if you are interested.
John Wesley Pruitt: the email bounced
but i’ve setup a gmail account (zipit4europe) for creating a list of people who are interested.
so send me your details and i’ll keep you appraised.
Douglas – Put the original oe image from last post back on zipit. eth0 seems to be good device but whenever I run the wpa supplicant i just get a steady repetition of:
CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS
Somethings still not right. Any other ideas. Thanks for the help.
Jim: in the last couple of debian images Aliosa27 posted use eth1 instead of eth0 — i followed Douglas’s advice about commenting out those two lines and backgrounding and it worked, not as well as my original oe and sweetlilmre’s kernel but ti works.
Jim SP: I see the CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS once or twice in my output also, but it is in among other things. Sorry to be so vague, but my ZipIt battery is run down and my charger is at home (while I am not). I’ll try to update with the actual output this evening.
Thoughts: Did you copy the original Marvell 88W8686 firmware files (that the autoupdater copied to your SD card) back into your root filesystem? In the right place? (I had to rename mine — the copies made by the autoupdater didn’t match the filenames in the image.)
What happens if you do this?:
ifconfig eth0 up
iwlist scan
Do you see the wireless networks you expect?
The only other idea I have off the top of my head is that you might have a typo in the wpa_supplicant.conf. (If you’re anything like me, then you probably messed up the punctuation, spacing or capitalization in the WPA passphrase.)
Russell- thanks i’ve had trouble getting online on the wireless access point here at work before, with a laptop I know works properly. Who knows? I’ll try it again when I get home on my own router.
Douglas- Networks are there. I’ll play with my wpa_supplicant.conf file some more and try again at home.
I just bought two from a target about 25 miles away for 25$ each and I’m here to join the community. I’ll hack both when they charge, assuming my sd card will work.
Good luck!, 25$/per is a great deal I doubt they’ll be this cheap again.
Russell and Douglas-
Thank you both for your help, my zipit works flawlessly on my home router. I noticed in a network scan of my work access point that it only supported CCMP. I will have to try some further tweaks to the wpa_supplicant.conf file I just didn’t have time today. Thanks again.
Jim SP: I’m glad I was able to help. Happy hacking.
I don’t have a handy CCMP network to play around with, but I see no fundamental reason why it wouldn’t work. The wpa_supplicant on the ZipIt is the real deal, not some stripped-down version.
I found an Ubuntu forums post which looks potentially helpful.
Also (warning: shameless self-link) I put some ZipIt stuff (including my sanitized wpa_supplicant.conf and some example output) on my own site.
Another possible gotcha: you may have trouble with networks that don’t broadcast ESSID (rant: this is not a useful security measure!). Try playing around with combinations of ap_scan=2 (or 1) in the global config and scan_ssid=1 in the per-network settings. Useful documentation of these options seems scarce.
Hey Douglas,
Nice plug
. I like the article. That’s good info, perhaps we should add to the sf page too? Lots of great stuff coming out !
I have my brand new “Open -Zipit” PocketBox ! woot!
I’m sure to run across a few thing I have trouble with but for now I boot, I get fluxbox, and mplayer runs from the command line. [the volume is very low but even boosting everything with aumix did not seem to help.
I don have a general question I haven't seen an answer too.
1. how to open a terminal in fluxbox.
2. how to left click
3. what is the keymap? [how to hit tab ect..]
To get the max volume, you can use alsamixer to increase the speaker output (last page, scroll right) but it sounds terrible past 92 or so.
Left click is the stop button, and the default hotkeys for fluxbox are Alt-t = terminal, Alt-m = maximize, Alt-f = fullscreen, Alt-c = close, Alt-i = minimize. Tab is the big “Z” button at the top middle of the keyboard. Prev/Next is mapped to pageup/pagedown, and the “…” key is Control.
Can you post up a video of you surfing the web with the web browser? or make a step by step post about what to do for us who just want to use the zipit for the web (how to install the scripts, what commands etc)? I was going to buy a netbook to be able to connect to hotspots, but this may be even better
Hey Riibb,
I think the next image we post should have a web browser of some sort included. I know the previous image I posted had a number of web browser packages installed. Next video I make I”ll make sure to include some stuff about web browsing. I imagine with the new debian package it’s as simple as ‘apt-get install dillo’ or ‘apt-get install fennec’
Hey All,
I just got back from the Target in west LA, and picked up a couple of Z2′s marked down to 25$. There are still 2 on the shelf if anyone in the area is looking for one!!
Now that I’ve got multiple, I think my next video/project may be getting a multiplayer game happening between 2 zipits. That may be fun
how far are we away from having it automatically boot into its own gui and being able too just surf the web?
z22, I think you could get this working pretty easily. You would just need to:
1. Have startx run automatically (like gdm)
2. Have your wifi firmware automatically extracted and renamed to the correct location in the image
3. Include the browser package and have it run automatically on flux startup.
Good Luck!
where i can find a zipit ?
im from brasil, so i can only buy online =(
Up and running, but i’m stuck and need some help:
1. I cannot use the number keys in the Terminal.
(Tried Alt/…/shift)
2. On the Toolbar, there is a setting “Alpha” it is set at “0″ and won’t change. (not sure if this is related to keymap)
3. The power key does not turn the unit off — have to pull the battery.
Any suggestions appreciated…
Use the reset button/hole on the left side to power off the Z2 after running the shutdown command.
running shutdown -h now also shuts the zipit down.
Im looking forward to the next image!
Hi Aliosa27,
I am new to this, so could you pl. elaborate on your diskimages comment? Can I do everything on a Windows machine now? Or do I still need to use a Linux box to extract the existing firmware and flash a new kernel?
I just bought a Z2 at my local Target for $25, and have been itching to try this out!
Thanks very much!
Hey ingolemo,
Yeah, you should be able to do everything from a windows machine now. I’ll test out myself tomorrow on one of my spare z2s, maybe make a followup video/tut or something.
zer0, haven’t heard of anywhere in South America selling the Z2, but I know Russel was working on a shipment to Europe, you may want to give him an email. Otherwise finding an ebay seller willing to ship to Brasil may be your next best option
Thanks, hunter!
I’ll wait for your tutorial before attempting anything.
If I used the 2GB image, how much space is left for data? I havent bought a card yet, and was debating between 2GB and 4GB.
And what would I use in Windows to transfer the image onto the card ? Would something like Rawwrite for Windows do the trick (http://www.chrysocome.net/rawwrite) ?
Hey ingolemo,
I have not used rawwrite myself, but from looking I believe it will work. Aliosa27′s commit comments from that SVN revision also list dd and psydiskwrite. I’ll let you know how it goes when my new sd cards come in. If you go for it, tou’ll be able to see the fat32 partition after a re-insert on windows so you’ll know if it worked.
Thanks. I totally missed the reset hole.
I recopied the filesytem to the SD but still can’t type numbers.
Shift key works for capitalization, Alt-T works to bring up terminal.
“…” key doesn’t seem to work.
zer0: i’m in the process collecting names, waiting on a response from a zipit distributor about bulk purchases and researching shipping costs and other logistics. send me you details to the gmail account zipit4europe and i’ll let you know when i have any specifics.
this is awesome that these little things can handle that. do you think they could run windows 95 lol
you can get them for $50 at http://www.zipitdirect.com?affiliateid=10067
and they won’t force you to buy the plan.
you can also get a free one and a year of free service if you pay 150 to be in the affiliate program, or you could just sell 10 of them as a free affiliate and buy one with that.
Ok anyone interested I have posted a quick and Dirty Faq over at sourceforge. hopefully people will find this useful.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openzipit/forums/forum/917462/topic/34170611
I’m making more progress on learning how to use this thing.
I have it hooked up to my wireless [Yay!]
I have telnet-ed out to a server and that worked great.
I have converted a few tv episodes to play on it [works quite well though I'm working on the volume]
I’m using a program called MediaCell video converter. Its perfect for this application!
The 2 things I’m having trouble with are
1. How do you type numbers in xterminal? something funky with the keymap? they work fine before i start x after x though they don’t work.
2. How can I create my pidgien config?
The following only applies to the original filesystem and kernel posted in the instructions
mcavity, run alsamixer and press “n” until you get to speaker, then use the “PREV and NEXT” buttons to change the volume…
you can also disable the speaker and change the headphones settings too… btw there are a LOT of options in alsamixer for this unit. as far as the number keys go, they don’t only not work in terminal (under x) but they don’t work under x at all… this is due to the fact the “ALT” key acts as an ALT key within X… however out of x and back to the TTY, the number keys work fine. (which is why I had to do certain things out of x to get things the way I liked)
Very quickly one bug I noticed was at a cold boot the tty after you login as root does not scroll down after a few lines and becomes rather corrupted, if you run a program (like alsamixer) and exit everything turns out fine though.
Pyr0: no where they sell them seems to force the sale of the plan I find.
(looks at comment about multiplayer games)
any way you can get nexuiz running on this thing? (j/k, lol)
Are the “Options” button and the “Play” button mapped to anything yet?
Handy Tips for those who do not know:
The bora_black style doesn’t seem to flicker as much as others do.
Right clicking a program’s taskbar and selecting “maximize” will put the application in full view.
“Stop” button is right click in X
“Volume” buttons on side act as “+” and “-” keys
Zipit button is
Happpy face is
alt+key for numbers and symbols only works out of X
“…” key acts as
Full blast the headphone jack could make you death, man this thing’s got power and the sound quality is damn nice
oops.. HTML tagging got me! (I put my keys in less than and greater than signs)
Zipit button is TAB
Happpy face is ESC
alt+key for numbers and symbols only works out of X
“…” key acts as CTRL
Hey Cprossu,
Great info! You should think about adding it to the sourceforge page. We’ve got some really good community knowledge happening. I am…. doubtful…. that nexiuz will work. I was thinking more of working off the wormux maemo port and getting wormux netplay working on the Z2, maybe start with something simple like chess or tron though. My absolute next task is a windows-only video/flashing tut for the windows folks, hopefully my new microSD cards will come in this evening.
Cprossu :
So does that mean you can’t use numbers inside of X?
I’d love to get one of these:
http://www.comsciences.com/product.htm
Hey Maxunknown, You should be able to use numbers within X yes, I believe somebody posted a keymap earlier.. That’s an interesting product, 300mhz marvell, limited ram, wireless instant messenger….. where have I seen that before
Hunter If you see that keymap let me know. I will add it to my FAQ. Right Know I dont know how to do numbers in X.
So its quite hard to do “mplayer filename.mp3″
Mike
Hunter If you see that keymap let me know. I will add it to my FAQ. Right Know I don’t know how to do numbers in X.
So its quite hard to do “mplayer filename.mp3″
Mike
Hunter If you see that keymap let me know. I will add it to my FAQ. Right now I don’t know how to do numbers in X.
So its quite hard to do “mplayer filename.mp3″
Mike
Hunter If you see that keymap let me know. I will add it to my FAQ. Right now I don’t know how to do numbers in X.
So its quite hard to do “mplayer filename.mp3″
Hunter
I’ll see what I can do, and I’ll perhaps pick up another unit..and see if I can find my other micro to mini sd converter… (those things are getting hard to find o_O)
maxunknown
Yeah no number keys under X with the standard keymap… Supposedly Lokichoas’s keymap fixes this issue, and is included with the debian filesystem has this keymap. But I saw no links to d/l it by itself.
Hunter If you see that keymap let me know. I will add it to my FAQ. Right now I don’t know how to do numbers in X.
So its quite hard to do “mplayer filename.mp3″
I did get pidgin working though I set up the config files on my ubuntu live cd system. Its a bit laggy but usable. I may have to look around and see if there’s a jabber client that’s lighter.
The thing is, the mouse emulator takes over the entire keymapping right now, so a working keymap gets ignored once the mouse emulator is loaded. I’ve been running without the mouse emulator most of the time because I need the keyboard symbols more than mouse functionality.
Karl, the mouse emulater(grab a recent one) does not take over the entire keyboard these days.
Ahhh, my bad. The keymap needs to be loaded after the mouse emulator. When I was trying out the new ones, I ran them through a terminal so it was loaded in the wrong order.
For anyone who doesn’t have a proper keymap in fluxbox, download Aliosa’s keymap.map from their page, put it in /home/root/.fluxbox, and add the following to the end of your /bin/startx script:
xmodmap /home/root/.fluxbox/keymap.map
if it doesn’t work, grab one of Aliosa’s new mouse emulators and change startx to load the new one. I’m using z2mouse-option because the option key doesn’t seem to be readable under x (no event in xev)
Do the readymade 2G (or 1G) images from SVN also save the existing firmware+wifi firmware to the SD card ? Or would those be lost if I were to use the readymade image?
Hey ingolemo,
I believe you’ll still have to flash your z2 with the autoflasher. I got my new sd cardsin today, and just started the tut. Hopefully up by the end of the night. I believe the process will be flash the zipit, copy off the backup files, write the disk image to SD, copy the backup files onto the new fat32 partition, boot the zipit into linux, copy the files from the fat partition to /lib/firmware/libertas. Good luck, i’ll post when complete.
Few more Tips to put into the faq.
Linux wireless commands .
To scan for local access points
root@zipit2:~# iwlist eth0 scanning | grep ‘ESSID’
To connect to an access point
root@zipit2:~# iwconfig eth0 essid “name” [no" "]
To run dhcp
root@zipit2:~# udhcpc
That should get you online as long as your not running wpa
- yes being able to type numbers in X would be nice =)
Few more Tips to put into the faq.
Linux wireless commands .
To scan for local access points
root@zipit2:~# iwlist eth0 scanning | grep ‘ESSID’
To connect to an access point
root@zipit2:~# iwconfig eth0 essid “name” [no" "]
To run dhcp
root@zipit2:~# udhcpc
That should get you online as long as your not running wpa
- yes being able to type numbers in X would be nice =)
/I made a support thread on sourceforge/
Karl
Where is the site to grab the new keymap? I cant seem to find it.
I’ve got my ZipIt flashed and it will go in to X, however, when I start xterm off of the menu, it opens, but does not show any typing. I’m running the 2.6.29 kernel, and have not modified anything.
Also, is there a Wiki for keyboard mappings, and other help?
Dennis
I am putting together a FAQ sourseforge.
Try pressing Alt-m to be able to see the text.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openzipit/forums/forum/917462/topic/3417061
Aliosa27′s keymap is at http://www.aliosa27.net/projects/zipit2 , it’s named keymap.map. I haven’t used it myself, but it’s very close to the keymap I’m using. I do not remember if xmodmap comes on the image Aliosa27 posted, if not you can install it from the console with apt-get install xmodmap on Debian, or ipkg install xmodmap on the OE image. Be sure to run ipkg update first if using the OE image, to update the package lists
What, precisely does “pass the shortcut” mean? I’ve been trying
$ ./script “http://.mpg”
but it says
“file not found: ‘%1′
failed to open %1″
It works great if I hardcode the link into the script, so it looks like
#/bin/sh
mplayer -vo fbdev -vf rotate=2 -bandwidth 100000 %1 “http://.mpg”
but that gets old fast (especially from the command line, where I don’t have copy+paste)
Also, I don’t have nearly the performance I had hoped–to get consistent framerate I have to use 320×120 for my resolution (which works great for widescreen movies like in the preview; but it makes 3:4 resolution videos tiny)
Hey poweruser,
What operating system are you running this script on? It will depend on what your sh interpreter points to.. Try $1 instead of %1, it’s the variable name for the first argument passed to the script.
As for the movie…the performance will vary depending on the movie, and what background programs are running, if any. Are you running this straight from sh or from a bash shell or from fluxbox? How much swap memory is used? Just things to check.. Good Luck!
OS: Emdebian–I followed your Windows tutorial (thanks for posting that by the way–excellent work!)
I’m running straight from bash; as in I have not typed ‘startx’
Checking with top (from an ssh connection, while the video is playing), if I’m reading correctly, I have used 0k swap. Oh I see I also have 0k swap free… Well there’s the problem lol. Do you have any tips on how to reactivate swap space, or should I just start it back from scratch (this time using the Linux method since Windows 7 doesn’t like physdiskwrite). I also messed up my apt sources so I’m not entirely against it.
Zipit reinstalled, swap fixed. Many thanks to you and the people on #zipit
Is it possible to download Hulu files with Linux? Does it violate some sort of copyright laws?
Hey Matthew,
No Hulu files downloaded, just re-encoded on the fly with a re-encoder. There’s a hulu linux client now as well. Good Luck!
I got astonishingly confused with this, and I found a similar method for streaming video.
Saving a link from http://sonic-lux.de/home/projekte/software/shoutcast_tv_lists/web/index.html in links 2, then using mplayer to open this as a playlist ‘mplayer -playlist example.pls’ its working great with no beggering about with the transcoder machine. rather simpler I thought. for youtube or anything else cclive has worked well for me, but this is far easier for quick video
I’m going to buy a couple more of these things as they seem bloody handy!
Hey Liam,
Good find! I have not seen this method before, and that saves quite a bit of time. Thanks for the heads up!
I tried this TUT and cannot understand how the script can come into play, plus cant get (%1) I tired ($1) script does not launch,also hard coding my IP address which is running TVersity 192.168.1.102
I picked up from “poweruser” above can you correct me please???
Trying this on “Irongeeks”"SideTrack”.
I have this in my script:
code:
#!/bin/sh
mplayer -vo fbdev -vf rotate=2 -bandwidth 100000 %1 “http:/192.168.1.102/.mpg”
above should I use quotations between my ip address for my hosting machine and “.mpg” please explain?? I know I’m a pain in the butt just trying my very best to pick these cool hacks you have on your site!!! =)
Hey Jesse,
Is mplayer installed? Does the script have executable permissions? Is bash installed? I’m not sure why you’re hard coding your IP address. This script is called from your web browser and passes the ip address/file info combo into the script which calls mplayer. You can also copy the link to the file, then paste it by hand. If that is not working, the script will not work. Good luck!