Want to watch a movie in the geek way? Well, you might consider using Geexbox, then.
What is it?

It is a media player. Or better: it is an operating system that fits in a 6 MB ISO and based on the 2.6 Linux kernel (at least for version 0.98 I tested) and the great mplayer media player most of you know. You simply burn the ISO and you get a bootable CD that will recognize most of your hardware (in my case it recognized all of that): video card and its tv-out, sound card and cd/dvd-rom and hard disks. It does not supply a console, but just a menu (look at the screenshots we made and those provided on the project's homepage) with a good range of choices.

You can look to DivX-Xvid, DVD's, VCD's and SVCD's, listen to audio CD or to a mp3's playlist. You can navigate through the menu using your keyboard, as I did, or using a remote controller: as stated on the project's documentation " GeeXboX can be controlled using a LIRC-compliant remote and receiver. The only officially supported remote is the Remote Wonder, provided by ATI. Many other brands sell exactly the same controller....".

A LiveCD, but installable, as it often happens. At the boot prompt you can type install and the installation takes place in few steps and few seconds. Tested in both modes, working just fine in both modes.

LiveCD

There's nothing easier than turning the power switch on, putting the bootable CD in one of the two CD/DVD-ROM I have on the test machine and have it booting. A nice bootsplash will welcome you while the boot completes. Last stage of boot will load all of the components in RAM and take you to a menu.

The menu offers the possibility to play what you want: you can open a file on several devices. As long as I see ext2, ext3 and FAT16 filesystems are recognized. You can play a DVD: as the software is loaded in RAM I removed the LiveCD from the drive and put a DVD. The DVD just start, no navigation menu, you just get the movie. For DVD you get the possibility to select scenes too. You can play a slideshow and choose its delay.

You can choose the format you want for your screen: 4:3, 16:9 and Cinemascope available (and working) so you can enjoy the movie in the way you like. The tv-out switch worked fine for me, I guess this depends on the support stage for your graphic card. And if you're scared about the noise that your box will produce during the show, consider that some care has been put in this small and great project, so, as an example, your hard disk will go to sleep after few seconds when in the LiveCD mode (if you're not using it, obviously). CPU fan can be the problem, but think of this nice piece of software running on a mini-atx environment, together with your television and a remote controller and you will get the idea behind this project.


Customization

What's the deal? Well, there is plenty of table DVD/DivX player that will probably do the same thing, these days, and their price is acceptable. Anyway building your player using Geexbox is easy and will give you the possibility to customize the software your player will run. The documentation that the developers provide is excellent and easy to understand, it covers all the possibility you have with Geexbox. You can recompile the whole thing, as source are available: you can add or remove support for devices, put new codecs in, update them and after a recompile you can put everything back on an ISO.

The ISO generator
This easy to use instrument, provided both for Linux and Windows, will allow customization starting directly from binaries, no need to recompile everything from sources. A clear example of this is the support for real player and windows media formats: codecs for these two formats could not be included in the distributed ISO cause of licensing problems. Adding them and package a new ISO is really easy thanks to this utility. It can also be used to produce auto-running CD's, including a movie in the ISO itself.

There are several way to contribute to this project: using it, donating money and hardware, porting it to new platforms. Try it, you'll love it.

Screenshots

Hardware tested

I tested Geexbox 0.9.8 on the x86 architecture, using an AMD XP 1900+ CPU, 256 MB of pc2700 RAM, nVidia based Geforce 4 MX graphic card and a sound blaster live PCI sound card. The boot took about 20 seconds on the testing box.