offbeat
Blockbuster new Raspberry Pi project turns any screen into old-school VCR
Who needs fancy menus and high definition? 240-MP will play your media files like it's 1999
I love Star Trek so much. I’ve watched most Trek series multiple times over the decades, and was shocked when, on my most recent watch of The Next Generation, I noticed something: High definition upscaling makes the show look way worse. Old-school 4:3 CRT television screens with their low resolution hid a lot of stuff, like tape on the Enterprise set doors that hid whatever names were stenciled on them for prior episodes, which are glaringly present on modern editions of the show. I’ve always been on the lookout for a way to capture the classic Trek feeling, and one … ahem … enterprising developer has done just that.Anthony Caccese, a principal product lead for enterprise platforms at Oak Ridge National Laboratory by day and a Raspberry Pi tinkerer by night, recently published an open-source project called 240-MP on GitHub. It’s a simple concept: Text-based menus that look like an old-school VCR interface, but with modern functionality and, most importantly, the ability to play local media files and Plex libraries on an old-school CRT TV.
