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Building a Linux Home Media Center

Posted by Zonk on from the you-needed-a-project-this-weekend dept.

RomanianClimber writes "Tom Lynema assembles an Ubuntu-based Linux home media center. 'Like a lot of people nowadays, I have a growing collection of digital media. My digital media is stored on a home Linux server. Most of the digital media players available today do not support protocols to connect to a Linux server, which make them unsuitable for my use. I realized the best way to connect my digital media library with my home theatre was to build my own Linux home media center (LHMC).'"

10 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Building My MythTV Box by anandpur · · Score: 5, Informative

    from OreillyNet
    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmed ia/2005/06/22/myth_tv.html
    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmed ia/2005/08/17/myth_tv.html
    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmed ia/2005/11/02/myth-tv.html
    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmed ia/2005/12/07/myth-tv.html

    http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/05/ 27/linux_media_pc.html
    http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/ 29/mythtv_hacks.html

  2. Stupidest article ever seen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is the most uninformative article yet on Slashdot. Other than the details of the workarounds for the different hardware on his system to work with linux (and what's new in that! LOL!), there's no information about what the interface is like, how does he control it using a TV-like remote, capture HDTV, view TV schedules, pause live tv, skip commercials automatically, etc.

    This is just another we can (try to) do it with Linux article. The guy should have at least tried using MythTV and told us the actual issues in setting that up.

    Compared to the commercial products like Sage, BeyondTV, and of course Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition, this is a 5-year old's level of gratification. How easy it is to satisfy a Linux nerd - something as simple as streaming stuff off a different computer is enuf to get an article and be featured on /. Pity!

  3. It would have been an awfully short article... by Minwee · · Score: 4, Informative
    ...if he dropped a KnoppMyth CD in the drive, booted it, selected "Install Everything" and then confirmed that he did want the default settings a few times.

    But where is the epic struggle in that?

    1. Re:It would have been an awfully short article... by ladybugfi · · Score: 3, Informative

      KnoppMyth is not the uber-solution. I have built a KnoppMyth box and while some of the stuff worked out of the box, there were still a lot of things that required tweaking to get right. I had SATA problems, MythTV FULL SCAN problems, PID problems (PID as in DVB provider id), non-existing /usr/local/bin/mplayer, non-functional DVB subtitling etc. And in addition to Myth config, I also had to tweak xine config to get 5.1 passthru.

      While this struggle was not epic (although I did document it in Finnish, 5 pages or so, instead of 1 in the article), I would not call KnoppMyth a SW that you "just drop a CD in the drive and install". But then again, I didn't expect that when deciding that KnoppMyth would be my HTPC SW.

  4. Re:MythTV under Mandriva, works for me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    ...can't wait to try to find a HDTV tuner with hardware based encoding that also works under Linux...

    HDTV shouldn't need hardware encoding. For over-the-air HDTV (which is ATSC), the hardware just tunes in the ATSC digital stream and you've got already-encoded MPEG2 High Definition video. Just save the raw MPEG stream.

    And there are cards under Linux that support this, like pchdtv.com's HD-3000 PCI card.

    Now how well and convenient it is to actually get them working is another question. That's one of the drawbacks of open source.
  5. Re:you know you've stumbled... by BootNinja · · Score: 2, Informative

    Redhat has disabled MP3 since RH9, SuSE since I think at least 8.2, and I noticed it was the same on the Mandriva distro I tried about a year and a half ago. Gentoo, on the other hand, will play mp3's as soon as you've emerged whatever media player you use. I don't think it has as much to do with the proprietary codec, so much as fear of some sort of retaliation from RIAA et al. I know the crippled version of xmms that shipped with RH9 displayed some sort of dialog to the effect of "We won't let you play mp3's because of copyright concerns." It seems to be mainly the distros who try to exist as a commercial entity that don't support mp3 out of the box, although, Debian also sees to do the same, as the parent mentioned.

  6. Re:you know you've stumbled... by Trepalium · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, it's not because of copyright concerns. It's the fact the MP3 codec is patented by Fraunhofer IIS. Fraunhofer has said they allow people to use implement the playback portions of their patents as long as the resulting program is distributed for free, but this isn't OSI compatible. The free WinAMP player was okay, putting it on a Debian CD which may be sold was not.

    --
    I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
  7. My own HTSRV project status by Xenna · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have had a MythTV box running for a few months (after earlier unsuccessful attempts with freevo and older MythTV versions.

    I boght a Hauppauge PVR350 card (analog TV) and used the "MythTV on Fedora" howto (google) and I was very satified with the results. So satisfied that I bought another Hauppauge PVR500 card so that I ended up with 3 tuners.

    My setup is non-standard for two reasons:

    1. My HTserver (HTSRV) is located in my server room. This considerably improves the WAF and keeps the living room nice and clean and quiet. I transport the A/V signals over CAT5 (using two baluns) to the point where the cable-TV enters the house. There a modulator mixes the signal with the regular cable channels so I can watch my MythTV HTserver's TV-Out anywhere in the house.

    2. Now I needed a way of controlling my MythTV server from behind any of my TV sets. To solve that I used my SqueezeBoxes ( http://www.slimdevices.com/ ). I wrote a Slimserver plugin (Perl) that taps into LIRC and allows me to control the MythTV server with the remotes from the Squeezeboxes.

    I'm thinking of replacing my living room audio system with a pair of powered speakers so that I'll end up with 'just' a TV, a small Squeezebox and two speakers. No 5.1 speaker setups for me, I just can't stand all that clutter. ;)

    There's another interesting project that I plan to look into. It uses Hauppauge's small and inexpensive $69 MediaMVP boxes (miniature diskless computers that run linux with Remotes and TV-Out) to build MythTV and SlimServer frontends:

    http://mvpmc.sourceforge.net/idx.php?pg=main

    This is nice because it allows you to watch different programs & recordings on different TV-sets, which my current setup doesn't allow you to do. Worth looking into if you're interested in a distributed media network rather than just a boring HTPC or HTSRV ;)

    X.

  8. Re:What is a "Home Media Center?" by JazzHarper · · Score: 2, Informative

    You should get a Squeezebox. I think it meets all your requirements:

    * Excellent sound quality. Supports MP3, WMA, FLAC, AAC, WAV and Ogg Vorbis.
    * Analog, digital and digital/optical outputs. Analog quality is better than any sound card.
    * The box is absolutely silent--no moving parts. You can keep your server in a different room from your listening area. You can use just about any existing/surplus computer as your server; there's no need to build a fanless machine.
    * Completely controllable through its remote or from a web-based interface.
    * Display is visible across the room.
    * Takes about one second to come out of hibernation.

    The downsides:
    - Form factor--doesn't fit in a rack.
    - The web-based interface is clunky.

    The server software is open source and runs on Linux, Windows and Mac. There is a Squeezebox emulator called SoftSqueeze that you can use to try out the system before you buy anything.

    I don't work for Slim Devices--just a satisfied customer.

  9. Re:you know you've stumbled... by swillden · · Score: 3, Informative

    Last time I checked, Windows Media Player supported creating MP3 files

    Last time I chekced WMP was not Free Software. That means (a) it's not legal for you to redistribute WMP, only Microsoft can and (b) Microsoft can (and has) paid for appropriate patent licenses.

    The LAME encoder can still be downloaded freely and plugged into just about anything.

    And the legality of this is questionable, and tricky. Under the "source is speech" argument, it may be that distributing source code is okay. Binary distribution is more problematic, and that's what Linux distros want to do. Distros like Debian, who are very careful about legal issues, find it safest not to distribute encoders (like LAME) at all, and relegate players to "non-free" status, if they're included at all.

    What am I missing here?

    That there are patents on parts of MP3 players and encoders, and those patents create difficulties for Free Software implementations. People may go ahead and do it anyway (similarly, libdvdcss is a circumvention device and is illegal according to the DMCA, but that doesn't stop individuals from using it), but that doesn't mean that people who want to obey the law can do it.

    --
    Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.