My open source TV
For Christmas this year I decided to surprise my wife with a new TV. To sum it up: hiding a 42″ TV in the closet was hard.
Oh well, the model I got for her is a Philips 42PFL7404H. It’s really nothing magical about it, it’s a rather standard LCD TV.
What did make me smile however, was the little paper I found next to the manual (which is done in 30 languages!) and the quick-start guide, a two-sided legal-sized paper that lists all the open source products they’ve used in the TV as well as the GPL and LGPL licenses spelled out in their entirety. Anyway, the products this TV claims to use are:
Linux kernel, Flash Eraseall, Nandwrite, Helper Application, Libc, Librt, Libm, Libpthread, libgcc, libstd++, Diet libc, libgphoto2, vsnprintf, GIF reading routines, base64.
I find it noticeable that there’s no shell or busybox in that list, which in my book is a rather unusual embedded Linux setup.
December 27th, 2009 at 17:43
I bet it had libcurl on the list if it could download something (fw update ?) from the intarwebs
December 27th, 2009 at 21:20
Well, it does have USB and can show images (and movies?) off that, so it wouldn’t really be totally out of the question for it to also do some kind of networking. Or just use the same firmware as more fancy TV sets that have more direct networking built-in.
And I’ll admit I was a tad bit disappointed that I haven’t contributed to any amount to mention in any of the projects my TV use!
December 28th, 2009 at 00:00
Have you considered hacking it at all?
December 28th, 2009 at 23:15
Nah, I’m really not that interested in doing that. Maybe if I had a second set I could play with while I used one as a TV, but in reality I have enough stuff to hack on in my ordinary life already without having to add more to my list! I’m not even sure what I would do to a TV even if I could manage to hack it…
December 29th, 2009 at 07:40
put rockbox on it, of course…yay!!!
January 10th, 2010 at 09:45
Did you consider mailing them and asking for the sources of all GPL’ed stuff they actually did use? Just to see if they would honor the GPL..