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Show HN: hacking our set-top box

15 points by juliennakache ↗ HN
We're 2 hackers out of NYC and we had tons of fun building Zapkast.com, our take on Social TV.

We played with: - c/c++ for hacking our set top boxes, - ruby/rails for the rest api, - eventmachine/node/erlang for the xmpp api/real time backend, - ios/cocoa for the iPhone app, - redis & mysql for the datastores.

We did everything ourselves, even the logo and UI :) Tell us what you think! http://zapkast.com

15 comments

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mickeyben
too bad it's limited to the US store
juliennakache
Let us install a set-top box at your place and you should be good to go ! :)
dahawi
well, it's not like a lot of people are going to watch live american TV from abroad ;)
lordarf
i love the screenshot feature
vkdelta
Would you please explain STB component of the app? I don't see any.
dahawi
Basically we have a server connected to STBs running C++ scripts that rotate over every channel (the STBs are operated with an IR blaster) to capture snapshots which are then uploaded to S3 (with a little node.js component) that are fed to the client app via XMPP.
vkdelta
Excellent! Thx for response. Just curious how many STBs you have. Why can't pull EPG data and use that as a source? But yes, won't get screenshots that way.
dahawi
Thanks for the suggestion ! We'll have to look into the EPG, for now we get the TV listings data in another way ;) Right now we only have 2 STBs, and their input is captured by 2 video cards (http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/). We picked this one because it has a very nice C++ SDK. Ideally though, we'd have as many STBs as we can to get more screenshots !
vkdelta
Do you have your email address here?
hughesdan
I'm curious, how are you handling the time-zone issue? For example, MTV runs an East and West Cost feed. Usually those are just time-shifted mirror images (but not always). Fox often runs eight or more national feeds breaking the country into arbitrary sections (think NFL Sunday). Are you planning to scatter your set-top boxes in different regions of the country?
isalmon
Very nice idea guys, going to use that.