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Linux Software Entertainment

Building a Linux Home Media Center 143

Posted by Zonk from the you-needed-a-project-this-weekend dept.
RomanianClimber writes "Tom Lynema assembles an Ubuntu-based Linux home media center. 'Like a lot of people nowadays, I have a growing collection of digital media. My digital media is stored on a home Linux server. Most of the digital media players available today do not support protocols to connect to a Linux server, which make them unsuitable for my use. I realized the best way to connect my digital media library with my home theatre was to build my own Linux home media center (LHMC).'"
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Building a Linux Home Media Center More

Building a Linux Home Media Center

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @11:34PM (#14469417)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I SERIOUSLY need to see the boxed set!

    • Re:Me too. (Score:5, Funny)

      by erveek ( 92896 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @12:52AM (#14469647)

      Great minds think alike. However, as a True Linux User (TM) I've resorted to converting all my media into ASCII so I could view it in GNU nano by keeping my fingers on ^V. True, it's mostly porn and it takes a lot of my time but i feel my self-respect is worth it !!!


      After a while, I don't even see the code. Just blonde, brunette, redhead.

    • It's mostly porn? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ergo98 ( 9391 )
      True, it's mostly porn and it takes a lot of my time but i feel my self-respect is worth it !!!

      Are you talking about the goatse as the submitter's link?

      Okay, this is flipping hilarious. After the whole brouhaha [slashdot.org], Slashdot listened to the tyranny of the majority and added nofollow on submitter links. Now we have glorious links like goatse instead. Awesome.
    • mplayer -vo aalib video Same result, without the pesky scrolling, plus sound.
    • And me. I call it GNU/Media.
    • Can this be done with left hand only? I need the right hand free for other purposes.

  • When will we not need an MCE box? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dada21 ( 163177 ) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Friday January 13, 2006 @11:37PM (#14469429) Homepage Journal
    I run XPMCE -- yeah, yeah, it works and the WAF is 100%. We continue to try MythTV and various F/OSS programs about 3-4 times a year though.

    But I think I might stop, soon. I already have a decent little file sharing network between myself and about 100 "close" friends. I think we could probably extend this to 1000 people and still keep intruders and others out. I have about a 10mbps pipe at home (beta) that should be available everywhere within a year. One of the providers wants to see it for $19.99 per month (as long as Congress stays out!)

    So that leaves me with my subjust line: when will we not need a dedicated box anymore?

    Bandwidth is almost free, compared to any previous bandwidth before it. 10mbps is just as fast as I can run to the video store and back (depending on the codec used and other parameters, but its close). If I keep maybe 10% of my content on my PC and share it with the 100 out there, I bet we'd have it covered pretty well even considering duplicates for backup. Maybe we need a protocol/program that takes BitTorrent and allows a network of users to safely share video/audio in a wide-area RAID configuration. The other day I lost a CD (AAC's actually, my car stereo supports it) that had about 1000 minutes of music on it. I run my AACs lower than 128kbps for the car. I had the entire set of albums downloaded from a friend in maybe an hour or so, I'd guess.

    The future for me is a system similar to AKIMBO (but open source and needing very little in the way of complex hardware) -- a set top box, maybe 60-100gig hard drive, the ability to copy data to the unit from my workstation, and the ability to set it up in this wide area RAID configuration with my friends.

    True "peer" to "peer" sharing of media, but no complexity needed that is the norm with an MCE -- you don't need terabytes of data, 2-4 tuner cards (my XPMCE has 4: 2 SD and 2 HD) as you can download the shows from BT or whoever else may have the data already, or even a DVD player.

    What would this system be missing? (I just typed as I thought it up, FYI)

    • Re:When will we not need an MCE box? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Cheeze ( 12756 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @12:21AM (#14469544) Homepage
      95% bragging, 5% actual content.
    • 10mbps is just as fast as I can run to the video store and back (depending on the codec used and other parameters, but its close).

      10 millibits per second doesn't get much. 10 Mbps is a different animal, that can stream as much as two decent DVD streams at half max bitrate, like video on demand.
    • Would you consider sharing, in at least a generic manner, how you accomplish your private 100 user network? It sounds very interesting. Is it VPN? How does the media present itself? SMB/CIF, others? It sounds very interesting and I would be grateful to hear more -- 100 users is a success story compared to what I have managed to work out. Star based VPN configurations just don't work that hot. Thanks
    • Depends on your country, in aus it's a lot harder (outside of capital cities) to get that kind of bandwidth, and it's hard to find it cheap anywhere at all. This kind of home media box config will still be interesting to a lot of people in higher bandwidth cost countries for a few years yet.
    • I;m currenty building my linux based media server.
      I'm buying a old xbox, throwing Xbox Media Center [xboxmediacenter.com] on it and running one of the many linux based content servers to feed the xbox media over the network. It can even play direct isos and it uses the remote to browse whats on your server.

      I just purchased a 8 port raid 5 sata card so I am going to eventually hit 2 terabytes with it.
    • I recently downloaded and tried out MediaPortal [team-mediaportal.com] (open source) and I have to say, it's the best I've seen. It scans your collection and downloads plots, actors, box pictures etc from IMDB so you can see everything about a movie. It plays TV/radio with a TV tuner card, has plugins, looks great and is overall fantastic.

      I had a bit of a problem controlling it because my remote was sluggish, but I found Bluetooth Remote Control (trial version) on a website yesterday and now I control it from my Bluetooth mobi
    • >What would this system be missing? (I just typed as I thought it up, FYI)

      It would be missing an optical free-space communication system, rooftop to rooftop, which would allow you 100Mbps connectivity to 2 or more of your neighbours.

      Using the internet for such "pedestrian" tasks as sharing static movies is silly, why not instead try to run a link to your 2 nearest neighbours houses, let them do the same, and so on...do some fast routing and there you have a truly fast network with high latency--well suit

  • you know you've stumbled... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ltwally ( 313043 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @11:40PM (#14469441) Homepage Journal
    "My Ogg music files played out of the box. The key to getting MP3 playback to work was installing libmad."
    You know when you've stumbled into linux-super-nerd-land when your media player cannot do MP3 out-of-the-box, but OGG plays just dandy!
    • Not really that surprising.

      MP3 is proprietary. They can't include it with a default distribution of something unless they pay royalties.

      When I installed ubuntu (for my laptop), it didn't come with anything that could play MP3s either, but could play OGG fine. Getting MP3 playback to work was pretty simple - apt-get had everything necessary available.

      Am I correct in guessing that most distros would end up the same - no MP3 support out of the box? Or is that just an ubuntu quirk?
      • It's more of a Debian quirk. Ogg Vorbis is Free Software(tm). MP3 is Definitely Not. That's why you'll find Ogg support in Debian but have to look for unofficial packages if you want to muck around with MP3s.

        Other distributions tend to have a more casual attitude towards this so they may bend a few rules.

        • Redhat has disabled MP3 since RH9, SuSE since I think at least 8.2, and I noticed it was the same on the Mandriva distro I tried about a year and a half ago. Gentoo, on the other hand, will play mp3's as soon as you've emerged whatever media player you use. I don't think it has as much to do with the proprietary codec, so much as fear of some sort of retaliation from RIAA et al. I know the crippled version of xmms that shipped with RH9 displayed some sort of dialog to the effect of "We won't let you play

          • Re:you know you've stumbled... (Score:5, Informative)

            by Trepalium ( 109107 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @03:40AM (#14470060)
            No, it's not because of copyright concerns. It's the fact the MP3 codec is patented by Fraunhofer IIS. Fraunhofer has said they allow people to use implement the playback portions of their patents as long as the resulting program is distributed for free, but this isn't OSI compatible. The free WinAMP player was okay, putting it on a Debian CD which may be sold was not.

          • I don't know about RedHat, but SuSE definitely supports mp3 out of the box. Maybe they dropped support briefly and the brought it back? I don't know. I use SuSE pro 9.3 and xmms and amarok are there.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Yeah. You have to install lame and a bunch of libmad files to get things to work. But Ogg works out of the box and FLAC does too.
    • ... And you know the end of the world is close when slashdotters make such statements.
    • You know when you've stumbled into linux-super-nerd-land when your media player cannot do MP3 out-of-the-box, but OGG plays just dandy!

      It's 2006 and you still don't know MP3 is patented, and therefor of questionable legality when it comes to distributing unlicensed MP3 players and encoders? Christ, get your head out of the sand...

      • (Poking head above the sand for a minute)

        Last time I checked, Windows Media Player supported creating MP3 files and you could still turn off DRM. That would mean Microsoft is supporting creating MP3's that can play with any player/encoder.

        The LAME encoder can still be downloaded freely and plugged into just about anything.

        What am I missing here?

        • Re:you know you've stumbled... (Score:4, Informative)

          by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Saturday January 14, 2006 @11:22AM (#14471050) Journal

          Last time I checked, Windows Media Player supported creating MP3 files

          Last time I chekced WMP was not Free Software. That means (a) it's not legal for you to redistribute WMP, only Microsoft can and (b) Microsoft can (and has) paid for appropriate patent licenses.

          The LAME encoder can still be downloaded freely and plugged into just about anything.

          And the legality of this is questionable, and tricky. Under the "source is speech" argument, it may be that distributing source code is okay. Binary distribution is more problematic, and that's what Linux distros want to do. Distros like Debian, who are very careful about legal issues, find it safest not to distribute encoders (like LAME) at all, and relegate players to "non-free" status, if they're included at all.

          What am I missing here?

          That there are patents on parts of MP3 players and encoders, and those patents create difficulties for Free Software implementations. People may go ahead and do it anyway (similarly, libdvdcss is a circumvention device and is illegal according to the DMCA, but that doesn't stop individuals from using it), but that doesn't mean that people who want to obey the law can do it.

    • For the same reason why DVDs do not play on a vanilla Windows install.
      No WinDVD/other decoder = WiMP can not play them.

  • Right-o, why do we still care about Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as solutions like this become more the norm, and pay-for-rights media becomes more readily available for download?

  • TFA misses a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chrome ( 3506 ) <chrome@stu p e n d ous.net> on Friday January 13, 2006 @11:49PM (#14469473) Homepage Journal
    The article spends about 95% of its words talking about how to get that specific hardware working under linux, and then one or two paragraphs actually talking about the interesting stuff - the software that he uses to run the media center. He even neglects to mention how he controls it.

    Isn't there front-ends to make this stuff easier than having a gnome desktop on the TV? What about remote control devices and infra-red support? Is there a nice way to navigate all the media?

    These are the things I couldn't solve easily two years ago ... I'd like to see a decent article that actually covers ALL the aspects of setting up a media PC.
    • from what I've seen, most free, opensource linux frontends are lacking a lot. namely control using something other than a keyboard/mouse.

      allow me to plug a project of mine: AFX [sf.net]

      a fully extensible frontent for linux which is designed to play media and games and is designed to be fully controlled with a joystick (no need for a keyboard/mouse).

      its still in development with no releases.
    • I agree, he spends most the article on how he set up his wireless card and how he set his clock?

      For starters, here's a list of things it would of been nice if he covered if he were to fill us in on the media part(in no particular order):
      * Sound card? Is he using on board sound? Does it support hardware mixing, if not, what kind of software mixing is he using. Does he have a digital connection to his receiver for ac3 passthrough, and pcm output?

      * More information on the video card. He says it supports mul
      • Agreed... In fact, the most important thing that makes an HTPC *special* is the software. Without special software, it is just a "PC connected to a TV".

        I have an HTPC that I put together myself. The hardware is basically *just* a VIA mini-ITX board in a case, and just about nothing else. It network-boots Gentoo off my file server.

        For the software, I have it running MythTV. For control, I recently got an IR remote working with it using lirc. (had been using a keyboard, until I finally stopped procrasti

      • Sound card? Is he using on board sound? Does it support hardware mixing, if not, what kind of software mixing is he using. Does he have a digital connection to his receiver for ac3 passthrough, and pcm output?

        Getting S/PDIF out working reliably on nForce-chipset boards tends to be iffy. I had it working OK on the nForce2-based board I was using previously for MythTV, but a desire to capture and play HD from my cable box led me to upgrade the system. It now has an nForce4-based board, and the latest st

    • I found [psu.edu] another article [linpus.com.tw] that is very interesting.
  • you could do a samba share and playback/stream almost anything on a non-linux HTPC solution (given enough elbow grease and initial config)

    But of course if you already had a linux backend why not have a linux front end... usually the biggest barrier is comfortableness with linux (or a certain adventersome spirit if a life long windoze user)... once you get over that it's pretty straightforward :)

    e.
    • Sounds like the media is already on a linux backend server? Why not cable the video/audio from the backend to your tv/audio amp and run the frontend on the same system? Savings includes electric power and the $360 he spent on the box.

      There is another solution, one that provides access to video and audio data and plays on a TV via 100Mbit ent, hauppauge media mvp ($40 on sale at Radio Shack). The open source project mvpmc.org provides access to mythtv recordings and to other mpeg video and mp3 audio data

  • DLNA is working on this (Score:5, Interesting)

    by digitalsushi ( 137809 ) <slashdot@digitalsushi.com> on Saturday January 14, 2006 @12:15AM (#14469529) Journal
    DLNA, the digital living network alliance, http://www.dlna.org/about [dlna.org] is a group working on standards to make it streamlined for your TV to grab files off your windows server, linux server, mp3 player, et cetera. Basically makes all your devices share the media together. I know nothing about it other than the roughest overview, but if anyone else knows of it please comment.

    • Re:DLNA is working on this (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Paul Bristow ( 118584 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @03:15AM (#14470002) Homepage
      It's based on UPnP AV Mediaserver protocols. There are projects around working on UPnP clients and servers and sample code from Intel for Linux.

      It's complicated to get your head around because of the Jargon used in DLNA but a little effort makes you realise what an elegant, distributed, powerful set-up this is. My favourite part is the proxy media server service that allows a server to also act as the directory listing for ALL servers on the network, providing a simple way to access all media, regardless of location.

  • Mvix (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DrugCheese ( 266151 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @12:20AM (#14469540)
    I've been running a linux home entertainment box for a couple years now. I use SuSE ( I think I have Suse 9.3 on there now) and a matrox video card with TV out. My sound I run directly into my stereo system. I use mplayer mostly to play my videos and I still use mp3blaster to play my tunes. Although I have a wireless mouse n keyboard hooked up to it, it's a pain because I still need to get up and turn on the monitor because the text is too hard for me to read on my TV.

    The computer I've been using recently for this task has kind of been overkill so I was happy to find today the Mvix Multimedia Player [mvixusa.com]. As far as I know it runs linux. Just needs a harddrive installed and it's ready to run. I'm thinking of replacing my computer with it so I can use my computer for other tasks (I can always find something). Anyone heard of Mvix before?
  • It looks like the media center standards are going to be wrappd around UPnP technologies. Specifically DHWG UPnP.

    In setting up various test and used Media Servers and DVR systems, it all comes back to a standard for the servers and the clients.

    Windows Media Center takes a lot of flack being MS, but it works in this senerio for a lot of items, as it uses UPnP.

    It is only a start though, as should have been stronger as UPnP was built into WindowsXP from 2001. MS will be adding more UPnP technologies in the upc
    • But I think things that get missed a lot are (in no particular order) A: noise. These things are noisy, my wife HATES that. CDROM's, hard drives, CPU fans, box intake/outtake, vibration, etc. B: quality, I've built my system based on a 64 bit Athlon 3000+ with a Hauppauge WinTV tuner, and Sound Blaster Live! card and a gig of memory. Watching 'live' TV at decent quality can take the CPU to 20-15% idle. That means skips and such. I know I could replace my TV tuner with a Hauppauge 150 (dual tuners, hardware

      • Re:MythTV under Mandriva, works for me... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        ...can't wait to try to find a HDTV tuner with hardware based encoding that also works under Linux...

        HDTV shouldn't need hardware encoding. For over-the-air HDTV (which is ATSC), the hardware just tunes in the ATSC digital stream and you've got already-encoded MPEG2 High Definition video. Just save the raw MPEG stream.

        And there are cards under Linux that support this, like pchdtv.com [pchdtv.com]'s HD-3000 PCI card.

        Now how well and convenient it is to actually get them working is another question. That's one of th

        • I didn't know that about the HDTV. That said the way things work, with driver support being what it is and any changes thrown into the mix I'll have to wait to see what kind of CPU utilization turns up when I can get my hands on one.

          At $169.98 the price point is much better then last time I looked. Like I said in my post, I'm a believer. But a Tivo is looking incrementally more attractive. I've got to solve the fan-noise issues, sound quality issue and CPU utilization or the project really is just an over

      • I know I could replace my TV tuner with a Hauppauge 150 (dual tuners, hardware based encoding, etc) but that leave HDTV unaddressed

        1. It's the PVR-500 that has the dual tuners, not the PVR-150.
        2. For HD, run a FireWire cable from your HD cable box to your computer. You should be able to get at least the local HD channels this way. In Las Vegas, I'm getting not just local channels, but most of the other digital-cable channels as well (except non-broadcast HD and pay-TV channels, mostly). If your compute

  • Here's how I did it (Score:2, Interesting)

    by flar2 ( 938689 )
    I also use ubuntu for a multimedia PC. Actually setting it up is nothing special. I'm using low end hardware, a 1000 MHz Duron, 512 MB RAM, an nVidia geforce4 ($30 new) with S-video output, and the onboard sound of the Asus A7N8X-X. This computer is in our living room and connected to a wired 100 Mbit network. I connected the video card and the sound to a home theatre reciever using S-video and RCA cables, respectively. Ubuntu detected and configured all of my hardware automatically. I downloaded the

  • Stupidest article ever seen (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14, 2006 @12:31AM (#14469585)
    This is the most uninformative article yet on Slashdot. Other than the details of the workarounds for the different hardware on his system to work with linux (and what's new in that! LOL!), there's no information about what the interface is like, how does he control it using a TV-like remote, capture HDTV, view TV schedules, pause live tv, skip commercials automatically, etc.

    This is just another we can (try to) do it with Linux article. The guy should have at least tried using MythTV and told us the actual issues in setting that up.

    Compared to the commercial products like Sage, BeyondTV, and of course Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition, this is a 5-year old's level of gratification. How easy it is to satisfy a Linux nerd - something as simple as streaming stuff off a different computer is enuf to get an article and be featured on /. Pity!

  • It would have been an awfully short article... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Minwee ( 522556 ) <dcr@neverwhen.org> on Saturday January 14, 2006 @12:47AM (#14469634) Homepage
    ...if he dropped a KnoppMyth [mysettopbox.tv] CD in the drive, booted it, selected "Install Everything" and then confirmed that he did want the default settings a few times.

    But where is the epic struggle in that?

    • Re:It would have been an awfully short article... (Score:4, Informative)

      by ladybugfi ( 110420 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @08:44AM (#14470613)
      KnoppMyth is not the uber-solution. I have built a KnoppMyth box and while some of the stuff worked out of the box, there were still a lot of things that required tweaking to get right. I had SATA problems, MythTV FULL SCAN problems, PID problems (PID as in DVB provider id), non-existing /usr/local/bin/mplayer, non-functional DVB subtitling etc. And in addition to Myth config, I also had to tweak xine config to get 5.1 passthru.

      While this struggle was not epic (although I did document it in Finnish, 5 pages or so, instead of 1 in the article), I would not call KnoppMyth a SW that you "just drop a CD in the drive and install". But then again, I didn't expect that when deciding that KnoppMyth would be my HTPC SW.

  • Article is definetly skimpy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fwitness ( 195565 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @12:54AM (#14469653)
    I've built 3 mythTV based Linux boxes now, and I'm always interested in the different configurations. If he truly got this MSI box (which I've seen before), it would be nice to see if he got the LCD to do anything useful besides the time, and does the volume knob actually work. He also ignores the remote, and how he actually controls the thing on TV. Even with wireless, a keyboard and mouse on your TV are far inferior to a good UI with a remote control.

    To the author: Go back and get some more specifics, then revisit your article. Linux people are devils, we're all about the details.

  • Gentoo is a better choice (Score:4, Interesting)

    by billstr78 ( 535271 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @12:56AM (#14469661) Homepage
    better documentation, easier MythTV integration, better hardware support. Had a great time putting together a Myth box with very modern hardware. Blogged about it [blogspot.com] too.
  • Now I can view the Goatse.ca link also provided by the author with my fresh home media center.

  • Slashdot Editor's Brother ... (Score:3)

    by billstr78 ( 535271 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @01:00AM (#14469667) Homepage
    ... Must have wrote this Linux.com article. I can't think of any reason such a brief and incomplete article would have made it to the front page. There are 100 better treatments of this subject out there, this is more of a discouragement than motivation to build one on your own.
  • Check out the Project for Open Source Media [www.posm.tv](POSM) as they are developing a Linux run set-top HTPC box. I've actually got an alpha version in my living room right now. At the moment it is proof of concept using some 5 year old whiteboxes (with new video card and 200GB HD), Azureus, Gnome Nautilus, some shell scripts and a Packard Bell remote control, but it looks and works great.

    In addition to all the standard HTPC features, the POSM box uses RSS feeds with bittorrent enclosures like the awesome Pep Del. [torrentocracy.com]

  • No pictures, no codec information, just sysadmin (Score:4, Insightful)

    by heroine ( 1220 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @01:46AM (#14469773) Homepage
    So where are the pictures of the HTPC? What format is the media stored in? What movies does it have? How many movies does it have? How much does it cost to have a dedicated NFS server, a separate dedicated HTPC, a monitor for the NFS server and a second monitor for the HTPC? In what country can you afford to have 2 of everything? Is it supposed to play movies or just mount a filesystem over NFS? How many times have you set up NFS anyway?

  • Really, it all depends on what the device is going to be used for. I have been planning on making a unit for a while, and here is what I will use it for, and here are my requirements:
    Useage: Playing music, and only music, through a receiver.

    Requirements:
    Storage: Preferably at least 200GB.
    Sound quality: Very good - meaning outstanding Linux support and digital optical out.
    Noise: silent. There's no point in listening to FLAC files if you have to overpower the machine with the music.
    Interaction: wireless r
    • While I agree with a few of your points, some of the others seem to be a little off.

      >Noise: silent. There's no point in listening to FLAC files if you have to overpower the
      >machine with the music.

      Where'd you rip your FLAC files from? CDs, right?
      Let's see... the way things were originally designed, you played CDs by spinning them on a motor in a CD player. Was it hard for you to hear the details in your music over the roar of your CD player's optical drive? No, it didn't matter because you had
    • You should get a Squeezebox. I think it meets all your requirements:

      * Excellent sound quality. Supports MP3, WMA, FLAC, AAC, WAV and Ogg Vorbis.
      * Analog, digital and digital/optical outputs. Analog quality is better than any sound card.
      * The box is absolutely silent--no moving parts. You can keep your server in a different room from your listening area. You can use just about any existing/surplus computer as your server; there's no need to build a fanless machine.
      * Completely controllable through its r
  • Everytime I see an article about building a media center PC, people always seem to use normal composite or S-Video outputs. Is there a good solution for HD output? Is there a video card supported by linux that can do Y-Cr-Cb component video output at 720p or 1080i? I once had an ATI card that would do this, but it only worked in Windows and even then it didn't compensate for overscan so 10% of the screen got chopped off. Some people have been able to use PowerStrip [pcworld.com] under windows to get certain video car
    • Rumour has it nVidia supports HDTV output using Y-Cr-Cb and DVI->HDMI adapters. The HD resolution is dependant on the card's chipset of course. Maybe I'll give it a go some day.
  • Why not just buy a KISS DP-558 ? Kiss homepage [kiss-technology.com]
      It is not 100% Open Source but it runs on Linux... it looks just like a large DVD player and the design of the box could be B&O's.

  • My own HTSRV project status (Score:5, Informative)

    by Xenna ( 37238 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @04:11AM (#14470134)
    I have had a MythTV box running for a few months (after earlier unsuccessful attempts with freevo and older MythTV versions.

    I boght a Hauppauge PVR350 card (analog TV) and used the "MythTV on Fedora" howto (google) and I was very satified with the results. So satisfied that I bought another Hauppauge PVR500 card so that I ended up with 3 tuners.

    My setup is non-standard for two reasons:

    1. My HTserver (HTSRV) is located in my server room. This considerably improves the WAF and keeps the living room nice and clean and quiet. I transport the A/V signals over CAT5 (using two baluns) to the point where the cable-TV enters the house. There a modulator mixes the signal with the regular cable channels so I can watch my MythTV HTserver's TV-Out anywhere in the house.

    2. Now I needed a way of controlling my MythTV server from behind any of my TV sets. To solve that I used my SqueezeBoxes ( http://www.slimdevices.com/ [slimdevices.com] ). I wrote a Slimserver plugin (Perl) that taps into LIRC and allows me to control the MythTV server with the remotes from the Squeezeboxes.

    I'm thinking of replacing my living room audio system with a pair of powered speakers so that I'll end up with 'just' a TV, a small Squeezebox and two speakers. No 5.1 speaker setups for me, I just can't stand all that clutter. ;)

    There's another interesting project that I plan to look into. It uses Hauppauge's small and inexpensive $69 MediaMVP boxes (miniature diskless computers that run linux with Remotes and TV-Out) to build MythTV and SlimServer frontends:

    http://mvpmc.sourceforge.net/idx.php?pg=main [sourceforge.net]

    This is nice because it allows you to watch different programs & recordings on different TV-sets, which my current setup doesn't allow you to do. Worth looking into if you're interested in a distributed media network rather than just a boring HTPC or HTSRV ;)

    X.
  • This is not Linux Based Media Center PC... This is just Audio Video output from linux based machine.

    If I remember correctly there was firm makes satellite recivers using with Linux. That box do same thing like this machine. It support NFS (Record or playback) also higher model has build in hdd support. Of course it had Satellite and TV inputs...

    Man, look latest Tech Show reports, if we call this thing a media center pc, they laugh us with other than mouth...
  • As much as I dislike Windows, on a decent machine, I'd much rather use XP MCE over Linux/MythTV. I've used MythTV for a while, and although it is extremely feature rich, it just doesn't feel speedy. I've got a Barton 2500+, and if that isn't enough to run the menu fast enough (I'm assuming faster computers still don't feel set-top-box worthy), there's something wrong. WMCE's interface w/ 3d-accelerated graphics seems very very slick and quick. Something that is needed for your casual user used to the ty
  • My 'solution' for the terminally lazy and/or cheap.. (like me)

    The Server

    PC with big disk running linux (or windows if you prefer)

    Install Apache

    symlink media directories to default apache home directory

    Done.

    The Player(s)

    An old laptop is what I use but you could of course use any pc, maybe a mac mini or whatever takes your fancy.

    On the laptop I use firefox with the mplayer plugin - I had to disable local caching in the plugin otherwise it was a bit choppy.

    So to play any content from the 'm

  • I have been using GeeXboX [geexbox.org] , based on Linux and MPlayer, for a couple of years and it works well.
    You can install it, but it's not necessary. So it's very easy to use.
    From the website:
    At the time of the first development releases (Dec. 2002), it was only capable of playing DivX movies, but now, nearly every kind of media file can be played with GeeXboX, with the OS supporting :
    * MPEG 1/2 movies (MPG files, VCDs, DVDs ...)
    * MPEG 4 movies (DivX, XviD, H.264 ...)
    * RealMedia and Windows Media movies.
    * OggM
  • I've just RTFA. Talk about an excellent job in putting people off doing it the Linux way. "This didn't work so I had to do this bodge. That didn't work so I had to do this bodge. This other thing didn't work so I got out my trusty string to hold it all together."

    If you want to put people off trying the very capable Linux MC distros and scare them into using Windows MCE, just point them to the article.

  • Pentium III 800Mhz
    256MB RAM
    some nvidia-based card with 64MB
    a Pixelview BTTV-based card
    Gigabit ethernet
    a CRT Nokia 19''
    a DVD-ROM of course

    This is my "media" linux box.

    Now why do we call it "media" is beyond me.
    Gets stuff from the file server and plays it smoothly..

    Music, Video, TV, Radio
    With some nice Logitech speakers

    May seem crazy but when i buy a new computer, it becomes a server.. after a while that gets a little outdated hardware-wise it becomes a desktop and finally what the market today calls a "media
  • As another /.er pointed out, good front-end tools are necessary to make this use of Linux desktops viable.
    Here almost everybody associates "Media Center" to a Windows machine.
  • I think with the prepackaged software in linux and windows media center, media center computers are finally starting to show polish out of the box. Unfortunately I think linux media centers have somewhat missed a devisive turn.

    Microsoft is starting to lean to a "put the media wherever and use it at your TV" approach. Probably based on the fact that most people already have computers. W/ the xbox 360 and the Windows Media Extenders you can have your media in your computer room and play it anywhere.

    I t

  • Get yourself a comuter (alt least a 200 MHz Pentium, 128 mb ram) with a huge harddisk, install a full featured DVB card, and install linvdr.

    http://linvdr.org/projects/linvdr/index.en.php [linvdr.org]


  • What the hell is this all about ? I could have written hundreds of articles like this. What does this article tell me :

    1: That ubuntu linux is able to run on an nforce MoBo, realtek 650 sound and an nforce2 video chipset (shocking).
    2: NFS can be used to mount shares over a network (so that's what the N stands for)
    3: Rhytmbox can be used to play and organise music files
    4: Totem is a videoplayer

    So in conclusion it tells me how to install linux, it doesn't bring anything new or innovating to tab
  • Upon reading the article, I thought, hey, maybe I missed some cool HTPC app which ties everything together as neatly as XBMC or MCE. When following the link (which actually worked... a first for slashdot :)) it's just some guy installing Ubuntu and making the Totem player work with his system.

    This did _NOT_ deserve a post on slashdot IMHO (or is Ubuntu that hard to install with full video and music support?)
  • I was thinking of building an project like this, and this was an rather interesting read.
  • That article was useless.. Who cares what hoops he had to jump through to get his particular hardware working. He chose the hardware poorly, making it difficult to set up. This is not relevant to the Home Media Center topic at all, and if anything makes the reader hesitant to use Linux for this purpose.

    Relevant topics would have been:

    - MythTV: provides an excellent media center interface, on par with anything for Windows or MacOS. It provides features that the others can't/won't provide, such as aut

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