Revision as of 02:32, 15 March 2009

My HTPC Project

[My HTPC Project web page.|http://mathey.nicolas.free.fr/HTPC/]

My story

5 years ago, I built a MediaPC to be able to record Sat and DVB-T channels, but also read DVD and Divx. I'm using Debian Etch as core system and VDR for the rest. As specials components, the system includes two DVB-s card (with one hardware decoding included), USB Terratec DVB-T, and ATI Remote Wonder (I played a while to get this one running perfectly). I let this Media Box to my parents, 3 years ago and now I'm missing this kind of DIY Entertainment PC, and I decided to build a new one to plug in to my Samsung HD Ready LCD.

I read a lot of article, and especially spent time on [www.homemedia.fr] website (and its forum), a very interesting french website about HTPC. After that I decided to buy my hardware (see below) and try to go first on MediPortal appliance software. The problem was, as I'm not very good in Micro$oft tweaking, that Windows didn't find my SATA 2 HDD or something like that. I gave up and went back to *nix based system.

I went around LinuxMCE because of the all-in-one scheme: Media player, TV, PVR, Telephony (I already played a lot with Asterisk), Alarm, etc. Unfortunately, Kubuntu 7.10/LinuxMCE 0710 were not compatible with the chipset of my mother board, so I went directly to Kubuntu 8.10 and will now try/test LinuxMCE 810 in the same time to see if I can do something of my specific hardware.

Hardware

• Case: Zalman HD160 Plus Black, with iMon LCD and pad
• MB: Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H, socket 775, Ge9400, HDMI
• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 (2.80 GHz), socket 775
• RAM: OCZ Gold Kit Dual Channel DDR2, 2 x 1 Go
• HDD 1: Samsung Spinpoint F1, 1 To, 7200 rpm, buffer 32 Mo, SATA II
• HDD 2: Seagate Barracuda , 360 Go, 7200 rpm, buffer 16 Mo, IDE
• Reader/Burner: LG GGC-H20L, BD & HD-DVD Reader
• DVB-S2: Digital Everywhere FloppyDTV S2 + PowerCam PRO
• FXS/O card: Digium TDM 421
• CPU Fan: Noctura NH-U9B
• Case Fans: Noctura NF-R8, 8 cm, 7 to 17 dB
• Power: Corsair Modular HX520W

LinuxMCE 810 Works Around

GA-E7AUM-DS2H

Not compatible with 710 but is with 810. Using the NVIDIA 180.x and ALSA 1.19+ drivers, both Graphics Acceleration and sound over HDMI are working perfectly.

Digital Everywhere FloppyDTV S2

Actually not officially support on Linux. Some patches are available from [1]. They will be officially present in the main kernel release starting 2.6.29. As Linux MCE 810 will be based on 2.6.28, I'll have to recompile the kernel.