Slashdot Mirror
Build Your Own Linux Home Theater PC
Vic writes "If you have ever dreamed of building a home theatre PC, Extremetech has details on building a Linux-based system, and covers all the details of this epic journey. They did get the unit to run lots of features such as CDs, video, TV, weather, media libraries, guide viewing and show recording." From the article: "To paraphrase one forum quote seen during the research phase of this piece: 'Buy the beer first, this ain't gonna be easy.' But there is some good news here too. Getting a Linux-based HTPC has probably never been easier, though that is admittedly damning with faint praise. So here then is the tale of our ongoing adventure toward building a Linux-based HTPC."
This is all well and good, but until someone manages to get an HDTV-ready HTPC, it's not worth it. Get a HD-ready PVR from your local cable/satellite company, combine with Xbox Media Center, and you're all set :)
Wasn't there an article about HTPCs a few weeks back (though it didn't specifically focus on Linux)?
gcc: no input sig
I find it interesting that very few of these articles attempt to cover HDTV or digital TV. There is more than one DTV card supported in Linux and an article containing this would prove much more valuable that just the "here's how to setup a box with a PVR-250/350" story that I seem to see everywhere.
:)
Where's the cutting edge stuff!?!
Just get a modded xbox. It's very easy to use and no headaches. I had it modded and the dude pre-loaded xbox media player. Plays pretty much anything. With the newer xbox 360 coming out, expect older xboxes to take a price dive around the holidays.
I started a project like this last fall, but abandoned it after i determined that it wouldn't pass the most important test of all. If my wife wouldn't be able to use it, it was worthless.
Not like she's a retarded spider monkey or anything - she's a graphic designer and uses OS X (left myself wide open for that one, i know) but if she's got to use three different remotes and a keyboard, there's no way in hell she's going to use the damn thing. I don't need her calling me at work to walk her through how to watch a DVD or listen to music.
Plus, if it's really easy and slick, then she'll be a lot more accepting of the equipment purchases that i tell her about.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
We have some bright sparks that set their pvr to record, automatically upload and torrent the file, and the rest of us don't have to set up all the esosteric hardware. We just have to subscribe to an rss feed and watch whatever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want.
Right now, I'm running a via-1000 mb with Freevo, and no tuner card. Plug it right into the tv, set up NFS and SMB shares to my fileserver and just wach TV.
It's not a media center, it's just a computer with some added software to try and simplify things. The problem is that in many cases the simplification leads to an interface that is foreign to the user. It's somewhere halfway between a VCR or DVD player menu system and a GUI. Not good.
/dev/video > /mnt/video1/Pause.mpg' process running in the background. After a slight delay, Xine just starts playing the Pause.mpg file as it's being recorded. I can pause the program at any time and pick up where I left of or go back. When I exit Xine, I'm even asked if I want to rename Pause.mpg to save it for later. And ALL of the playback functions whether it's from the capture card, MPG, AVI or WMV files or a DVD can be stopped using the kb shortcuts. "Q" always gets you out of trouble by quitting Xine no matter what. Music playback and Photos are all handled by the software that comes with Fedora.
Considering how many people these days are VERY familiar with the W.I.M.P. (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) paradigm, there is no need to disguise what these boxes really are unless you are trying to create a very limited use appliance like a Tivo or iPod.
With that in mind, my home theater PC is just a Celeron (P4 family) running Fedora Core 3, Xine (which does nearly everything) and a Hauppaugue PVR250 card (which is perfect for this sort of thing). I wrote some scripts and created some icons to match and my wife finds this WAYYYY easier than the VCR menus system, the Windows ME based system we had before and you know why? She looked at it and said, "Oh, it works like a computer. This is easy'. I've been running like this since about February. It's perfect. Click on one icon and the system becomes a "TV". Hit "Q" (thanks to Xine's extensive kb shortcuts) and you're back to the desktop. Watch a DVD? Just pop it in the drive and Fedora's MagicDev application will launch my "playdvd" script which automatically starts a fullscreen Xine session and starts playing the DVD with full menu navigation support, etc...
Schedule a recording? Just click the scheduler icon and thanks to the magic of Gnome 2.x's Zenity add on, I have a series of nice GUI based dialog boxes that allow me to select the date and time of the recording as well as program name and recording length. It sticks all the info in cron and the show is scheduled. Pause live TV? Just click the "pausetv" icon on the button dock and Xine launches while I have a 'cat
My wife loves the new system since she feels it's the easiest I've ever set up. The real key is to put down the pretenses that this box is anything more than a computer. For my next trick, I'll be completely eliminating any TV or stereo gear from this setup. The TV gets replaced by a much higher quality display LCD computer monitor. The Yamaha 5.1 amp is getting replaced with an amp of my own design that will just be an amp leaving all the preamp features to Gnome's Mixer applet. Can't get any easier than that...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o