Linux Media Jukebox on the Cheap

tsetem writes "Over on ExtremeTech, they have a write-up on building your own Linux Media Jukebox for a little over $500 and a bit of elbow-grease. This is probably the PC we were hoping that the Lindows Media PC would've been." This particular project uses Freevo which has matured significantly since I last looked at it.

Comments

Freevo, MythTV

[Mysticalfruit]

I like Freevo, but MythTV actually have live TV pause features and lots of addons...

http://www.mythtv.org

Re:Freevo, MythTV

[Silwenae]

I would disagree that Snapstream is a fair comparison to MythTV, especially when you include the weather, music and game modules available, though setup is the biggest differentiator.

In addition, with MythTV having the ability to do frontend and backend - record on one box and play on another, so you can have the noisy machine in a closet somewhere and the quiet one by the TV, is one of the best things Myth has going for it.

That, and it has an extremely active community on the mailing list.

Re:Freevo, MythTV

[Anonymous Coward]

In MythTV CVS there is basic support for the WinTV PVR 250/350 card. You can record/watch live tv/playback but right now there isn't any seeking functionality -> coming soon.

Re:Freevo, MythTV

[Anonymous Coward]

Too much work? Geez, dude - just go to tvguide.com and put in your zip code, pick your service and get an html page with all the channels. Then awk for the right fields and cat it into the config file.

This took me about two minutes (I'm on win32 right now) and the spam filter wouldn't let me post all 500+ lines ...
2 WPBT
3 WPTV
4 WTVX
5 HSN
6 WXEL
7 WGN
8 WPXP
9 WPEC
10 WPBF
11 WFLX
12 QVC
13 WFGC
14 WBZL
15 WTCN
16 TVGC
17 WHDT
18 WLRN
20 GOVACC
21 WPLG
22 WSVN
23 PSA
24 LIFE
25 COURT
26 MAX
27 HBO
28 HBO2
29 HBOSG
30 SHO
31 TMC

Re:Freevo, MythTV

[leighklotz]

I dunno, the perl intaller for XMLTV just did that all for me by itself.

Freevo, on the other hand, is a moving target with tons of documentation about how to solve obscure past problems for people deeply involved. Despite there runs at it with a WinTV card, a DVD drive, a Packard-Bell remote, and a Matrix G400 (at one time the recommended configuration), I've not been able to get it working. Once or twice I tried installing from RPMs hoping that would set more defaults up, but it failed in obvious ways. When I noted this to the list, I got back a polite "Please don't report bugs when installing the RPMs; use the .tar.gz file." Next time when I tried the .tar.gz file and provided a bug fix, I got back "Please use the CVS tree." Conclusion: Freevo is not for ready for me to try. And yes, I looked at it this week.

Re:Freevo, MythTV

[/dev/trash]

MythTV looks cool but for god's sake don't go looking for help from the developers. They point you to instructions that don't work. Then when you ask a question they again pint you to the instructions and then they call you stupid when you tell them that you get an error on step 3 of the instructions.

The whole attitude was that MythTV was great and had no bugs. Anyone who reported a bug was an idiot and should go back to Windows.

Re:Freevo, MythTV

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a great deal of experience with both systems (Freevo and MythTV), so I am just adding my 2 cents.

First off, I built a Linux From Scratch system to do this, because I wanted just the DVR stuff on these systems.

From personal experience, I like Freevo quite a bit more. The big winner for Freevo is the user interface. It is more designed for a TV. The problem with MythTV (and the MythVideo and MythMusic modules, specifically) is that the interface seems to "computer oriented."

Freevo isn't as mature in the TV Timeshifting stuff, but a lot of progress has been made. Also, Freevo records to a standard file format, so you can play it using any media player (MPlayer, RealOne Player, Windows Media Player, etc.) MythTV uses a Myth-specific file format (based on NuppleVideo), and currently you can only play it with MPlayer, after you've applied patches.

Anyway, both systems have their benefits, but Freevo wins my personal vote for best media system.

Re:Freevo, MythTV

[KingFoo]

I've been monkeying with an EPIA M-9000 board and MythTV for about a month now.

The C3 900 is too slow to do the whole job on it's own. The M-series boards show promise, with the onboard MPEG decoder, but VIA's support for the video hardware is poor, and the mpeg decoder support is non-existent at this time. When everything is being done in software (color conversion and decoding) is able to play most video file formats (not DVD). Right now, if I could do it over again, I'd go with one of those PCI all singing all dancing video card/pvr cards (remember that the EPIA boards only have 1 PCI slot, or 2 with a riser). If VIA wants to (and is able deal with legal/company issues), it might be able to do everything at once (mencoder can record divx 320x240 movies in realtime, and possibly a larger format at higher quality), but right now, it'll 'just' work as the set-top portion.

here's another one ;D

[Brian Boitano]

made by a friend of mine ;)

Or even less thanks to Microsoft...

[iainl]

I've been labouring under the impression that one of the reasons why chipping XBoxes (list price £129 as of last Friday) with a mod chip (~£50) or even less thanks to yesterday's /. story is so great is because they do an excellent job as media jukeboxes themselves.

The only part missing is that they don't have the inputs to record your own stuff, unlike these tv-tuner equipped boxes. If you just want to use playback (either from the internal drive or over the local network) then a chipped XBox is much cheaper.

Cases

[minaguib]

I've been researching this myself for a while and one of the problems I faces was actually finding a case that resembles a VCR in dimensions rather than the traditional TOWER-pc. Here are a few links to interesting cases/systems that you might find interesting:

http://www.littlepc.com/
http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/slim_pc/slm /pro_slm_detail.php?UID=335&MODEL=MS-6243
http://www.partshelf.com/giggmaxmodgb.html
http://www.storever.com/
http://www.linux-works.com/browser/html/our_produc ts.html
http://www.evalue-tech.com/evalueweb/products/spec ifications/model.cfm?mn=EEC-5000

For the ones that come with a mobo/any hardware I cannot vouch for how well they work under linux (or windows for that matter).. These are just bookmarks from some initial research I did.

Why not an Xbox?

[calbanese]

$199 for the Xbox. $59 for a mod chip. $10 for some Cat5. And the open source Xbox Media Player.

Though you won't get Tivo-like functionality with it. But at that price you could afford to buy a Tivo if you really wanted it.

A swing and a miss

[stratjakt]

This is all fine and good. A guy built a PC and put linux on it and hooked it up to his TV. It's no great feat, but it's linux so it's on slashdot.

Anyways, here's what's missing or could have been improved..

TV Tuner Card Hauppauge WinTV PCI $60

Does the Hauppage WinPVR card not work? This costs only a few more beans, but provides vastly superior captures and onboard MPEG2 compression, IIRC.

Keyboard Silitek SK-7551 $20

A keyboard and mouse? This is the main stumbling block. A true MediaPC needs to be controlled through a simple interface with a remote control.

Also, stick an LCD display on the front with a few buttons so it can be used without the remote.

Of course that requires a bunch of coding work to make sure everything fits together seamlessly, and there's no trace of being a "PC" left in there.

The new Radeon AIW Pro cards fit the bill for both video capture, playback, remote capabilities, and firewire transfer. Of course, they cost as much as this whole project.

(In a nutshell I just spelled out the Media PC I'm working on putting together)

In the end, this guy built a PC and installed Red Hat on it. Whoopty do. He can call it a MediaPC, he can call it a Star Trek supercomputer. It's still just a midrange PC with Red Hat installed.

Re:A swing and a miss

[Sagz]

"Does the Hauppage WinPVR card not work? This costs only a few more beans, but provides vastly superior captures and onboard MPEG2 compression, IIRC."

I know that the MythTV folks are working hard on getting this to work.

Re:Freevo vs. MythTV

[Anonymous Coward]

MythTV plays any format that mplayer does to via the MythVideo module. FYI.

Dreambox?

[frozenray]

The DreamBox DM7000 looks promising to me. What I'd like to have is a network ogg and mp3 player, and the DM7000 seems to have all the features I want, with hardware MPEG2/PVR functions thrown in to boot (and MPEG4 apparently on the way). It runs Linux, so retrofitting Vorbis and MP3 compatibility should be no big deal. Retail price is about $500 in my area, but I'm sure I can find a better deal on the 'net. More accessories (wireless keyboard) and pictures here.

Anybody have experiences with this one?

German c't magazine ran a cool (but pricey) DIY media center project in 2001, see this post of mine. They had plans to convert it to Linux, but it's outside my price range, mainly due to the large LCD screen.

Re:What I want from a media PC

[Eric Ass Raymond]

VIA EPIA mini-ITX series would seem to fit your requirements.

I've built a multimedia box based on one of these sweet motherboard/CPU combos. They can be run without fans (or with a small 40 mm fan) and have integrated 100 Mbps LAN, USB2, Firewire, VGA (+tv out), 6 channel sound and a hardware MPEG decoder. Add a slimline DVD/CD-RW combo and a large external harddrive (external to avoid problems with the small power supply). There is a one PCI expansion slot for the TV card.

I'm running it under Windows, but Linux drivers are available here.

myHTPC

[SheepHead]

If you're running Windows try myHTPC. It already does, can do, or will do nearly anything you want.

Play videos, MP3s, view the weather, XMLtv guide information, launch emulators like MAME and any others (see the forum for myGames), view visualization plugins with Winamp or Windows Media Player 9, launch executables, write your own plugins... view your MP3s by cover art, your games by screen shot, control it with a remote or a gamepad... (find a joy2key program in the forums to use a gamepad for now.)

Really, just check out the screen shots on the homepage. It's only been around for a few months and new releases come fast and furious thanks to Pablo's hard work. It is basically "like XP Media Center Edition, but better, and free." (as in beer, for now.)

sheephead

Re:Noise / fanless epia

[Anonymous Coward]

WRONG!!! :D

WinTV PVR 250/350

http://ivtv.sourceforge.net

Re:But how quiet is it?

[4of12]

A G3 is a better tool for the job than an Athlon.

So that's why the TiVo uses a PPC chip!

Incorrect initscripts info?

[Da Schmiz]

From the article:

Next, we want to execute this script on startup. To do that, we have to place a link to it in the /etc/rc5.d sub-directory, which is where scripts get executed on startup in RunLevel 5, which is a full multi-user run mode with networking and X-Windows. To create this link, bring up a window in Gnome, and go to the /etc/init.d sub-directory (or wherever you've placed the bash script). Right-click on the file, and drag it onto the desktop. You'll be asked if you want to move, copy, or link to this script. Select "link here." Now, in that same window, change to the /etc/rc5.d sub-directory, and drag the script link from the desktop into this sub-directory. Next, you need to rename the script using the following convention-- Look at all the scripts that begin with the letter 'S' (these are services scripts, which get executed after kernel scripts, which begin with the letter 'K'). Find the last script that begins with the letter 'S', which is usually S99local. Verify that this is the highest-numbered script beginning with 'S'. If yes, rename the link to your bash script to: S100lvm The script will now execute on startup, and the needed LKMs will be available to Freevo.

[Stupid /. formatting...]

OK, that doesn't jive with what I learned in RHCE class. On a RedHat system, init processes the rc?.d scripts in asciibetical order (so S100lvm would actually come before S99local), passing "start" as the first argument to those scripts that start with S and "stop" to those scripts that start with K. The idea is that your init.d script should accept start and stop arguments and perform accordingly. Once you drop this script into /etc/init.d, you should be able to use chkconfig to set up the proper symlinks in the /etc/rc?.d directories. (A simple "chkconfig lvm on" should put "K" symlinks into rc0.d, rc1.d, rc2.d, and rc6.d, and "S" symlinks in rc3.d, rc4.d, and rc5.d.) Plus, you can use "service lvm start" to avoid typing "/etc/init.d/lvm start" (if that's your thing).

Aside: Also, lvm is a bad acronym for "Load Video Modules", since LVM is the Logical Volume Manager, and RedHat includes support for LVM out-of-box.