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?"

Comments

remote control, etc

[Van Halen]

For remote control, have a look at Irman, which is supported under Linux via LIRC. Definitely the way to go.

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...

LinuxHTPC project - Debian based distro

[niall_the_holbytla]

I'm just about to start work on LinuxHTPC - a Debian GNU/Linux based Home Theatre PC distribution.

http://linuxhtpc.holbytla.org

Probably the best source of information is the AVScience HTPC forum:

http://www.avsforum.com/ubbcgi/forumdisplay.cgi?ac tion= topics&forum=Home+Theater+Computers&number=12&Days Prune=5&LastLogin=

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

Dolby Digital on SBLive?

[Kisai]

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.