

Show HN: hacking our set-top box - juliennakache

We're 2 hackers out of NYC and we had tons of fun building Zapkast.com, our take on Social TV.<p>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 &#38; mysql for the datastores.<p>We did everything ourselves, even the logo and UI :) Tell us what you think!
http://zapkast.com
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mickeyben
clickable: <http://zapkast.com>

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vkdelta
Would you please explain STB component of the app? I don't see any.

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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.

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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.

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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 !

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vkdelta
Do you have your email address here?

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isalmon
Very nice idea guys, going to use that.

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mickeyben
too bad it's limited to the US store

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dahawi
well, it's not like a lot of people are going to watch live american TV from
abroad ;)

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lordarf
i love the screenshot feature

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lithium42
Great idea, I like it !

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julienhwd
Nice App!

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patothon
Nice!

