BeagleBone Media Center

Description

Whether you are a hobbyist or a professional, this book will get you fully equipped to resolve the most commonly occurring media related challenges. If you want to expand your horizons beyond lighting an LED and push the limits of your board, this is just the book for you. Working knowledge of Beaglebone is assumed. Review: Review of BeagleBone Media Center by David Lewin - Introduction ============ The book BeagleBone Media Center by David Lewin is delivered as a guide on how to use the BeagleBone or BeagleBone Black from BeagleBoard.org and open source software packages to create a media center that you own and control. The author argues that this can be useful for personal use as well as business. Chapter Overview ============ This book is organized into six chapters. The first three chapters are basic motivation and introduction, including installation and usage instructions for MediaDrop which is the open source software of choice for powering the media center. Chapter 4 is a detailed section on setting up your BeagleBone Black, webcam, and MediaDrop software to support webcam streaming. I don't know if this really fits with the theme of a "Media Center" but it was a really cool and seemingly useful project either way. This was probably my favorite chapter. Chapter 5 is the only chapter that is truly BeagleBone specific and described some of the more relevant capes (add on hardware) available for the BeagleBone as well as how to install and use Android OS on the board. The final chapter closes with an encouragement to use your creativity and come up with your own projects. While I love and completely agree with the sentiment, the project example given (controlling an LED matrix through a client server connection with a Qt based GUI on the client) doesn't really seem like a good fit. I don't see how that project is related to media center usage and the author never clarifies this connection. I believe it would have been much more useful if the author showed how to do something like set up a GUI client for controlling media playback on the server for example. Pros ============ - Easy to follow examples. - Emphasis on Open Source. - MediaDrop (the chosen software) is Python based which makes it easy to extend for your own purposes. - Even though the book is marketed as a BeagleBone Black specific book it would would nearly as well for any single-board computer. - Author provided some interesting use cases that I hadn't considered to be typical for "media centers". Cons ============ - The author often fails to really provide sufficient motivation. - There are typos scattered throughout, none of them are major and they don't affect any of the examples but the book could have used another editing pass. - The author is not a native english speaker. I began to have suspicions early on due to some strange sentence structures and word choices, my suspicion was later confirmed in a screenshot in which the primary language is French. This will likely not be an issue if you are also not a native English speaker but it did cause some parts of the book to be more confusing than necessary for me. Conclusion ============ Overall, the book reads as an in depth user guide for MediaDrop on an embedded platform. Most of the examples are not specific to the BeagleBone and could easily be adapted for use on other systems. While there are some typos and strange sentence structures, the book is generally an easy read and the examples are very clear and easy to follow. I recommend BeagleBone Media Center if you are looking for an easy to follow guide on how to get your BeagleBone set up as a media hub. Review: Excellent - Très pédagogique : l'art de rendre simple et attrayante une technologie qui semble réservée aux spécialistes. Donne une très bonne idée de tout ce qu'on peut faire, et à faible coût, avec une carte BeagleBone !