Entertainment

Content, music, sporting goods, other fun stuff.

Content

Streaming has done a lot to dissuade my trust in the last decade. Problematic content is vanished or "corrected" while Fahrenheit 451 style slop is generated to replace it... feels bad man. My content strategy is to own and have physical possession of whatever I want to consume -books, movies, TV, music etc. The setup on Defiant reflects this.

Onboard Media Stack

The media stack runs on a small Pi cluster at the nav desk; audio routes from the salonviewscreen Pi's audio jack to the boat sound system. This way whatever is playing on the "TV" (the salon viewscreen pi) plays all over the boat. Speakers are paired in-cabin and cockpit - so you can play audio from the viewscreen down below as surround sound, in the cockpit as "driving music" or both.

Note

Once the salon viewscreen pi is moved out to an accessible spot, it will be easy to swap the viewscreen HDMI with the one for the mini projector on deck. This means on calm nights, hoist the main and 🎬 MOVIE NIGHT! 🍿 🎥

Everything is physically controlled by the media center:

Pis

• boatflix — Pi 5 NAS

  • 2 TB external + USB SSD OS
  • Samba shares (Music, Movies, …)
  • ErsatzTV was removed because it just didn't get any use
  • Jellyfin server is the primary service for this pi
  • cloud sync that decrypts and pulls added content from S3

• salonviewscreen — kiosk Pi 4

  • labwc desktop, Chromium kiosk autostart
  • MPD + myMPD for audio playback
  • Jellyfin client
  • Music share mounted CIFS from boatflix → /mnt/music This is both the screen "driver" that runs the main viewscreen onboard (in the salon) and also the vessel's music hub. Every device onboard (Tablets, phones etc) can connect to the mpd jukebox on this Pi via web or specific client, and control the music playing onboard. This is critical because unlike edge clients (i.e. casting Spotify from your phone) our setup means everyone can control the music at the same time. If I want to add a song to the queue I can, and then if you need to pause music quickly to hear the VHF you can - there is no single control point.

• Other Pis at the nav desk: OpenPlotter Pi 5 (see Nav), NUT server (coming soon pi 3), Ironclaw server (coming soon, pi 5 8gb)

Per-host IPs, ports, and audio device IDs intentionally omitted; see private notes.

Audio routing

• Boat sound system → 3.5 mm headphone jack on salonviewscreen
• Typical control flow: phone/tablet → myMPD UI → MPD on salonviewscreen → audio out

Cloud Processing

As a general rule for all onboard electronics, if it needs the web to work we don't do it on the boat. There are a few exceptions (see Iron Claw) but power, bandwidth and space are at a premium onboard so what can live in cloud infra, does.

Content I acquire needs to be both backed up and prepared for local use. This entails:

• transcoding video into client-ready format (web clients onboard, and I don't really want a pi transcoding in-flight to save a little space)
• cleaning up artist/album/track metadata because I don't always get it right
• encrypting the final products
• deep-freeze storage once the content has been downloaded to onboard memory

This happens in a containerized stack with soft polling; when Defiant connects to the internet again after running silent, the content manifest in S3 is scanned and any new content is replicated locally, at which point the content is marked for deep storage.

Network / cross-refs

• LAN architecture, switch, key device IPs: see Connectivity
• HA infra: see Home-Assistant
• Nav desk hardware layout: see Nav / Interior

Sporting Goods

There are lots of ways to be entertained without a screen. In the quarterbirth locker:

• fishing pole
• snorkel gear ... I need more hobbies.