KDE Announced the Plasma for TV – Bigscreen.
Plasma Bigscreen is KDE’s interface for big TV screens which is announced based on KDE Neon image. Plasma Bigscreen is suitable for single board computers and large TV screens. KDE says that Plasma Bigscreen will provide media-rich applications suitable for TV and also the traditional KDE Plasma desktop applications. This would be a game-changer if the user can run KDE Plasma desktop applications directly to the big screen TV. The applications, of course, would be redesigned and tweaked to fit in the big screens.
“This project is using various open-source components like Plasma Bigscreen, Mycroft AI and libcec with a modified KDE Neon img for the Raspberry Pi 4 to allow easy accessing content-related services on your TV.”
Voice control is a unique feature for any smart TV interface. Plasma Bigscreen uses Mycroft AI with its “skills” to provide voice-controlled features via TV remotes (Bluetooth enabled).
You can use your normal microphone enabled TV remotes which is available off-the-shelf as it follows CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) protocol over HDMI.
Although it is available for single board devices and Big screen TVs, KDE says it would be a perfect fit for small PC monitors as well.
Table of Contents
Apps
It is expected that the BETA image (see link below) would be pre-loaded with media-rich applications catering to all popular streaming services.
However, a dedicated app site is also being built where you can download upcoming voice-enabled apps directly to your Plasma Bigscreen.
Where to Download
This project is still in the development phase and a Development BETA preview is available for download from SourceForge. Grab your copy from below link:
- Development Preview (BETA)
- Mycroft Bigscreen arm img – Raspberry Pi 4 (Model B)
- Plasma Bigscreen – Mycroft-GUI 1.0 – libcec
- Size: 1.8 GB
- user/pwd: mycroft/mycroft
Setup
The above BETA image is currently available for rpi4. You can follow the below steps to set it up for your Raspberry Pi 4 device:
- Download the above image file.
- Use etcher or diskimager to burn img on to a microSD card
- Start MicroSD from rpi4.
- Connect to wifi (or use ethernet cable).
- Register the device and start using bigscreen.
For detailed manual instructions read here.
Source code and follow the project
- Plasma BigScreen: https://invent.kde.org/kde/plasma-bigscreen
- Mycroft GUI: https://github.com/MycroftAI/Mycroft-GUI
- Server Backend: https://github.com/mycroftai/selene-backend
- Quick Overview: Get started with Voice Apps
- Command side: Mycroft AI with Python
- Visual side: Mycroft GUI with QML
- Telegram: https://t.me/plasma_bigscreen
- Forums: https://forum.opendesktop.org/c/bigscreen
Bug Reports:
For KDE Plasma Bigscreen:https://bugs.kde.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=plasma-bigscreen
Being a new player in the big screen TV market, KDE Plasma Bigscreen expected to be more popular in the coming days. Privacy, user data all these big issues users face today with traditional interfaces will not be an issue anymore, thanks to Free (as in Freedom) and Open-Source nature of the project.
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