Difference between revisions of "User:PaulColby"

Revision as of 04:41, 6 November 2008

Having been very impressed by the LinuxMCE Video, I have begun playing with my own LinuxMCE system... I will record my rough thoughts and findings here, and move the relevant ones into the appropriate main pages as they become more than just random notes ;)

My LinuxMCE Wiki Bookmarks

Here are some links to pages within this wiki that I like to refer to often, and/or have trouble re-locating when I do want to refer to them.

• Display Drivers
• DVD Install And Custom Partitions

Hardware

Core / Hybrid Server

Laputa (MD)

Laputa is my wife's desktop PC, but by disabling the harddrives (via the BIOS), and enabling LAN booting, it makes a decent temporary media director to play with.

Unnamed 1 (MD)

A media director currently in the process of being build out of spare parts. So far, this MD is not capable of faultless playback... it has some obvious frame-drop when streaming DVD ISO's from the server.

Unnamed 2 (MD)

A new media director, destined to be my main home theatre machine.

mini-ITX MD (future)

Like many others, I'd love to use a mini-ITX MD... possibly VIA EPIA based. But searching around the net (and this site), there seems to be no definitive answer to the question of performance. So, I've decided to just go ahead and build one as parts become available... fingers crossed ;)

Motherboard

For a mini-ITX MD, the choice of motherboard is perhaps even more crucial than it is for other MD platforms - mainly because all (or very nearly all) hardware should be built into the motherboard itself.

So, with that in mind, here is a list of things that the mini-ITX motherboard should support (feel free to add suggestions, and/or make comments):

• a CPU - obviously! See the following CPU section below for more details.
• a graphics card with OpenGL support.
• video output - ideally HDMI, or component video, though S-Video at the very least.
• S/PDIF audio output.
• LAN - at least 100MB/s, but 1GB/s would be ideal.
• at least one RS232 communications port to connect to my Onkyo receiver.

Well, that list may well be a pretty tall order for such a tiny board... we shall see.

The MSI MS-7411 looks like an ideal candidate... not sure of its availability, but

• its used in the AMD's "Maui" next-gen Home Cinema Platform (look closely at the second picture).
• some more pics here

CPU

The CPU should be very low power - ideally fanless. So, perhaps one the higher VIA Eden processors?

Scratchpad

Just for testing wiki-formatting...