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Building the ultimate A/V component?
ibbey writes "The recent articles on hacking Tivo have me thinking... What would it take to assemble a combination PVR, DVD, MP3, CD, Web browsing system? Assembling the basic components is simple enough: Reasonably fast PC, ATI All-in-Wonder video card, DVD player, big hard drive, etc., all connected to a nice TV. But what about things like a remote control? Who want's a DVD/PVR without a remote? A wireless keyboard would work, but would be less then ideal. How about Dolby Digital output? Anything special needed? What other features are needed/wanted in such a system?"
Mmm, that looks nice... thanks for the link. Not like I would be able to afford it anyway...
I have an SB Live! with a LiveDrive II and have hooked it up with my VideoLogic DigiTheatre DTS and can confirm that it does do Dolby Digital 5.1 (Once the DVD software is properly set up the decoder clearly recognizes the 5.1 signal and handles the rest from there) I didn't have the possibility to test DTS yet because none of my DVDs has a DTS track but in theory that should be possible too. Greetings
is a P200 (should get a faster one) with a 6GB drive (should get a bigger one), remote control via LIRC and a cheap-ass remote control, video in via a BT848 TV tuner and video output via an external scan converter hooked up to a 27" Sony Video Monitor (ie a TV without a tuner - should get a proper TV).
I also have a remote mouse which came with the scan converter, but unfortunately no remote keyboard - though i would suggest one of those keyboards with the mouse built-in.
This meant i could watch TV fullscreen or in a window via the BT848, play MP3s with mpg123 & LIRC (remote buttons worked for stepping through tracks and selecting playlists) and surf the web/chat on IRC at the same time on the same screen. I also had the playstation plugged into the BT848s composite input so i could play PSX on the same screen or in a window with the click of a mouse.
Was fun, great for the 'wow factor' but somewhat fiddly without extensive desktop and application customisation to increase font sizes etc.
I've since torn the setup apart, and just use the P200 as a general purpose PC.
But this stuff is all quite doable, a lot of fun, and linux is a great platform to do it on.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
P3-800/Maxtor DiamondMax Plus/128 Mb PC133 SDRAM
ATI PC2TV
Pioneer DVD-ROM/Sigma Hollywood+
Hauppauge WinTV-D
Cable modem thru a linux firewall.
Toshiba TW40x81 HDTV (upto 1080i)
Yamaha RX-V1 Digital Receiver.
Linn AV51 Speakers
The Toshiba remote controls the TV/VCR and is programmable for the HDTV remote. It controls the WinDVD thru programmable IRMAN (works great for DVD's and CD's!) Wireless AirBoard for keyboard control of surfing, screensavers, and other digital media.
Waiting for:
ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder (next version includes DTV and HDTV-out/component connections)
DC/Pro 24/96 (for dvd-audio)
-Radeon AIW will be an amazing card with TIVO-like quality and functionality.
-Hauppauge's WinTV-D card displays HDTV in downsampled 480P format, but digital decoded sound thru Yamaha 6 channel input sounds great. It seems they are not releasing their WinTV-HD for proprietary reasons - which has really been the whole sad story for all these digital media on PC's. This has been a major project of mine for almost a year. It's been an incredible pain with windows, and proprietary roadblocks, and running cool yet quiet... Next challenge is getting everything to work under linux.
tcboo
As for Dolby Digital, I'll bet that some high end sound cards support it, but I have no links to back this up. Also, Linux support may very well not exist for these. (hmm, I'm assuming you would be running Linux but you don't say... however this is /. afterall) ;-)
For other features, networking is a must, to control it from elsewhere and perhaps to get program data like the Tivo does. I've always envisioned my house of the future having a central audio server somewhere with all my CDs as high quality MP3s. Then in each room would be some sort of networked terminal for song selection, and a pair of speakers connected to the server's sound card. Have as many sound cards as rooms where you potentially want to have something different playing at the same time. The same could be done with video. I suppose someday soon disk space will be cheap enough that we'll store terabytes of DVD video the same way we store gigs of MP3s now.
Then, it'll need intelligent software to control it. The software should take command-line input, gui input, networked input from remote clients, ir remote control input, and of course, voice input. Fast search/play capabilities are a must, but a menu-driven UI could be available for those who want it. My current system at home (not quite the audio server described above, but slowly getting there) has a custom perl script I wrote that plays songs, albums, etc based on regular expression searches. So rather than wading through a menu to get to Rock -> Van Halen -> 1984 -> Hot For Teacher, I can simply type "playmp3 ^Hot" and it will play everything that matches. Great convenience. Same thing for playing movies on DVD (hmm, do they make 200-disc DVD changers or anything like that?) and selecting TV programs to watch.
Just some random ideas, that's all I have to say...
Say hello to zMac.
I have a project on the go at the moment, building a PC into my coffee table. It started off from a conversation with some half-geeks about that it would be handy to have imdb.com when watching movies. From there (and a lack of DVD player) meant that I was to build the fore-mentioned contraption. Anyway I'm currently waiting on a hydrolic lift from a Horn Sewing Cabinet to me sent to me from the manufacturer so I can have an optional pop-up monitor for those times when it would be annoying to read an email when everyone else in the room is waiting to see who the final Survivor is. By the way most desktop PC sound cards suck.(yes even for basic sound throughput) If your gonna do this then go with a quality Stereo System instead.
I believe everyone's comments are very on-the-mark about this subject. I have done a bit of research on these AV units and recently purchased a unit from Equtek that boasts much of the features everybody seems to want. Though I have yet to see its working Linux version, I purchased the Windoze 98SE version and find it does the trick quite well.
It goes beyond any of the units (in speed for sure!) I have seen with its AMD Athlon 800 MHz processor. As noted by another 'Slashdotter' it features an ATI All-in-Wonder card which really rocks the video aspect. A Soundbaster Live coupled with 4 Cambridge speakers provides a Dolby Digital Surround experience.
It comes stock with 56k modem but I was able to negotiate for an Ethernet adapter for high speed connectivity. The only drawback may be the wireless keyboard but there may be IR options built into the motherboard that can be advantageous.
I think it's quite humorous that Apple brings out the G4 Cube touting it as a new and revolutionary threatening to sue competitors while Equtek has had their E-Qube since early November 99' (I've had mine since February)! I guess it clearly shows that marketing might resides in the all-mighty dollar!
I'm just about to start work on LinuxHTPC - a Debian GNU/Linux based Home Theatre PC distribution.
Probably the best source of information is the AVScience HTPC forum:
Basically the hardware to go for at the moment is either an SBLive Value with digital out or a 24bit 96kHz audio card (such as Delta Dio 2496) and the Geforce2 Ultra. Some of the GeForce cards are able to handle HD material with their HVDP chipset, but NVidia admitted that some 1080i material wasn't performing too well and hence the Ultra.
The SBLive has a problem though - the digital out is not a true SP/DIF output and so has nothing in the way of voltage constraints. It is possible to damage an expensive receiver.
The Delta Dio 2496 (aka DCPro2496 at Digital Connection) provided both coaxial and optical inputs and outputs and RCA analogue outs. This is the one to go for, but I haven't been able to confirm the functionality of the current Alsa drivers, let alone save enough for the card yet.
Both audio cards can output Dolby Digital and DTS, but native 44.1kHz audio can only be handled by the Dio - the SBLive upsamples everything to 48kHz and hence introduces all sorts of jitter and artifact problems.
--
niall@holbytla.org
-- niall@holbytla.org
I have a SB Live Value (the version with the Coax/minijack digital out) and you can hook it up to a AC3 decoder via the COAX type connector all you have to do is buy or make a mono-minijack to single RCA connector. That's it. No fancy stuff here. You just make a S/PDIF(minijack) to S/PDIF(minijack), IIRC center-pin to center-pin.
You DO however have to make sure your sound card has that feature first of all (Some Aureal A3D and AC97 Codec's have them... not many but some do)
Check out Turtle Beach's site for the Aureal cards... Also I think (but not sure) Cirrus Logic makes a AC97 chipset (I can hear the EWW's right now) that is used in a pretty nifty sound card by VideoLogic that has multiple AC97 codecs for doing multi-speaker (surround... I forget now) But I do recall it mentioning something about offloading MP3 decoding to the sound card (Forget the typical AC97 "winmodem" style sound card)
I think it's actually a requirement for AC97 codec designers to have that option, I remember a C-Media chip (used in the BookPC's) that in the manual for the BookPC it mentioned optical out or something. (I don't have it anymore)
Though in the C-Media Windows driver it's there (S/PDIF out)
I think the SBLIVE by default is set Digital out always on, and has an option to disable the analog instead.
(DON'T BE FOOLED, THE OLD BOXED SBLIVE DOES NOT HAVE THE DIGITAL OUT. IF IN DOUBT, GET THE X-GAMER MODEL. It's exactly the same except has gold plated connectors and an Digital CD connector)
BTW... if anyone missed it, there is (in windows 2000 at least) an option to use DIGITAL audio mode... It works on IDE drives (and SCSI with less reliabiliy) but tends to skip easier. You can use this instead or if you have more than 1 CD drive and only 1 CD-Audio cable. (Like I do)
Ja ne.