Insignia (Chumby) Infocast

Posted by EricBall, 24 February 2011 · 131 views

While on a 2 week vacation to watch the Daytona 500 (my wife is the NASCAR fan), I picked up the Chumby powered Insignia Infocast (in spite of none of the Best Buy drones knowing what one was). Now that I have it, I'm wondering what I'm going to use it for.

It certainly will function as an 8" 800x600 digital picture frame, just stick in an SD card. Ideally I'd like to pull stuff from iPhoto or Picassa (since that's where I store photos now). It can also play back videos, although the challenge will be figuring out the right codec/container/bitrate. It also has UPnP and it sees my MythTV server, so I might try transcoding HDTV shows, or stuff from the TiVo.

It also can play MP3s, although I haven't played around with it yet. And I don't know if there's an iTunes interface.

There are also a thousand or so Chumby widgets which should work. Finding ones are worthy to use is a different story. I have set up a Twitter app for my wife. It's okay, but not perfect.

But it's also a mini Linux box. Whether that gives me anything I want I have yet to find out.

EricBall
Feb 25 2011 7:05 PM

So I have it playing MPEG4 Part 2 (aka XVid) videos. It's also possible to create both channel widgets and control panel widgets. Unfortunately, it seems no-one has tried to develop a control panel widget and the majority of the channel widgets are junk (I mean, 228 different clock widgets?). I'm tempted to take the time to figure out how to develop (or at least reverse engineer) some of my own widgets, although I don't have a pressing desire to.

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EricBall
Mar 9 2011 8:42 AM

Got H.264 working by disabling as many x264 features as I could. Now I need to start re-enabling those features and find out which (if any) break the Infocast decoder. One frustration is x264 is primarily an encoder, not a transcoder. Thus is has limited input format support and I'm not sure how it handles audio. ffmpeg is a transcoder which uses x264 for H.264, but it doesn't expose all of the x264 input parameters. So I'd really just like to use x264, but need the transcoding abilities of ffmpeg. Maybe one of the other transcoder/x264 wrapper programs (like mencoder or handbrake) will be better.Update: Handbrake is the wrapper I wanted. Any x264 options which aren't set via the normal interface can be set via the Advanced panel. My testing so far seems to indicate the Infocast decoder is more memory & CPU restricted than feature restricted. So the video tends to stutter rather than error out.