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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."
I've been running media centre pc 2005 on our plasma screen for a while now... and although its good at tv, its complete rubbish when it comes to web interfaces, remote control and most of all the music library! It can take over 5 minutes to load, and there no option to organise on directories instead of media tags!
Windows: Where do you want to go today?
MacOS: Where do you want to be tomorrow?
Linux: Are you coming or what?
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
Linux: Are you coming or what?
More like:
Linux: Hey, are you going to eat that?
...just wait until you try finding something decent to watch.
No, but some of that is a hardware requirement.
Everytime a story like this comes out, the MythTV faithful sprout up, but it's hard not and a list of requirements like that shows why:
MythTv already does:
# Store music, home movies, recorded TV shows, digital photos
# Play back all these media seamlessly
# Support a wide variety of audio and video codecs
# Play back DVD movies, and look as good as or better than a DVD player
# Have a simple GUI that any family member can use
# Serve this media up to other client machines on the home network
# Be able to handle HD music and movie formats, both present and future, with minimal upgrades (okay, maybe we're reaching a bit on this one)
This one is hardware dependent for any OS:
# Run quietly enough so that its fan noise doesn't interfere with the enjoyment of the content it's serving up
I have no experience with this one:
# Go in and out of sleep states with no difficulty
Which only leaves these two:
# Be rock-solid stable 24/7
Frankly speaking, MythTV isn't TiVO, and your mileage may vary. My current uptime is 18 days on my mythtv box. For my wife, a MythTV crash (frontend or backend, she can't tell) results in a computer reboot to bring it back up for her because she's willing to hit the power button but not willing to learn to restart it.
# Support the playback of DRM-encoded purchased/rented movies and music
For any copy protection there is a way to beat it, but what you need is specific to the system. For things like DVDs and Apple's Fairplay the solutions are known and common. For things like downloaded movie rentals, I don't know of any cracks for them, so this could conceivably be an issue.
Never confuse volume with power.
Its called KnoppMyth, based off Knoppix
http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html