It’s just an idea so far. I don’t have the time to devote to polishing it, unfortunately.
As you might know if you’ve been reading me, I’m an adherent of Freevo, which runs on a machine assembled specifically for the purpose of watching media on a TV, which doesn’t even have an antenna plugged in these days.
What I thought of today is making a Freevo plugin to correctly handle Firefox running underneath it. There’s a lot of reasons to have a web browser in a set-top box, and the TV remote I’m currently using has more than enough buttons to deal with it. The biggest problem is overscan. Due to the way analog TV works,1 TV signal must include fairly wide margins on the edges. Without overscan, you see black bars on all sides of your video, which isn’t very nice. With overscan, running Firefox on a TV screen would involve either some serious mess of window positioning2 or living without scrollbars, not to mention losing about 10% of the window surface, making a lot of pages completely unreadable.
Today it occurred to me, that I could, in fact, create a theme for Firefox optimized for TV display — as far as I know, Firefox theming allows for control fine enough to ensure margins to account for overscan. In the same manner, normal Firefox customization would allow me to get rid of all the button bars and control it exclusively through keystrokes simulated with the remote, making the most of the limited screen real estate and low3 resolution.
This really should be investigated, it’d be useful.
- I don’t have the money for a modern TV anyway, nor a serious desire to own one.↩
- I’ve been there and I don’t want to go there again, honestly, it involves some very unpleasant scripting.↩
- I run my Freevo at 800×600. Overscan cuts the effective display surface down to about 700×550, give or take a few pixels — depending in real time on the overall brightness.↩
Post a Comment