Building a gentoo HTPC (incl. Blu-Ray) [work-in-progress]

Tariella · Last edited by Tariella on Thu Oct 30, 2008 10:13 pm; edited 2 times in total

Hopefully this is the right place to put this thread.
I started to build a gentoo HTPC and want to share my experiences. No doubt, there will be some questions on the way as I make my progress. So I decided to put this in the assistance section of the forums.

I'll start with my hardware:
Mainboard: GA-MA78GPM-DS2H (AM2+, 780G chipset and 128MB sideport memory mATX)
CPU: AMD Athlon X2 4000+ (energy efficient)
RAM: 2GB DDR2 1066 SLI (OTC with coolers)
Graphics: Onboard Radeon HD3200+ (HDMI, supports UVD - unified video decoding)
Audio: Onboard 7.1 Audio (not used since I'm using the HDMI Audio out)
BluRay: LG GGW-H20L (reads HD and BluRays and burns BluRays, also supports AACS-firmware patch from doom9 forums [see also my BluRay thread])
HDD: Western Digital Green 1TB
Screen: LG 42LY99 FullHD LCD TV
RemoteControl: Linux4Media Control with IR reciever connected to one internal USB connector.
(Sorry for the german links here - I'll search for the english ones and replace them later)

My first question:
There are 2 TV card options so far (but feel free to suggest others if they work for you):
Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1300 (PCI) or 1700 (PCI-e)
They are both hybrid analog and DVB-T cards with hardware encoder for analog (afaik not yet supported for any of those cards).
After looking at the support level for Linux on linuxtv.org I'm not sure for which one to go. Drivers for both are in the works, it seems.

Any suggestions?

So far I installed gentoo and the necessary drivers for the already existing hardware.
For the onboard graphics I chose the proprietary fglrx drivers since they support HDMI audio and Xv. (I tried the open ati and radeonhd drivers fist but ati gave me a green/violet picture and radeonhd was too slow for fullHD video.)

I´m using amd64 and gentoo-sources-2.6.26.
Also installed is the newest Xorg version (server 1.5.2) with evdev (and the needed hal policies). Even the remote is recognised out of the box (as keyboard and mouse). :-)

For the video system I´m going with freevo because its very customizable and light. Also it works with mplayer which I prefer because of the support of bluray formats.
Mplayer and ffmpeg are coming from the berkano overlay.

I already played around with different mplayer options to find the best options for quality and performance. So far I´m not yet completely content with my results.
Suggestions are welcome. ;-)

rokstar83 · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 423 Location: MD

For analog cable tv tuners its Hauppauge PVR 150 or nothing in my book. They work flawlessly. I've never played with (and don't have) digital cable.

For Graphics, a cheapo geforce 7000 series nvidia card can handle HD TVout via HDMI cable. The proprietary drivers work quite well.

For playing, I personally love mythtv. Its got a lot of overhead (mysql and whatnot) and it does require quite a bit of work getting up and running but it does everything I need and looks nice.

Good luck with the Blu-ray stuff, you got a link to that other thread you mentioned?

Tariella · Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2008 10:12 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the info, I'll research your suggestions.
Edit:
The PVR card sounds good, but unfortunately I dont have enough space/slots in my htpc to use an extra card for analog and DVB-T input. (There would be a lot of possible combinations)

The HVR 1300 seems to be working with analog and DVB-T since 2007 (see this thread). Is there anyone who has it working?

The other BluRay thread I mentioned is here. I reedited the BluRay part and will add the recoding part to the first post as well.

I have slight issues with tiny pauses in fullHD videos (recoded blurays, .mkv files) every few seconds. Of course, I know that there is no GPU based decoding in the video drivers yet, but I believe the recoded files should work fine. I'm expecting performance issues with blurays later though.
My mplayer options are the following: - autosync 30 -fs -fps 24/1001 -cache 8000 -framedrop
Mplayer niceness is set to -20.
I tried with different settings for fps, framedrop, autosync and niceness.
Video output is Xv from fglrx drivers.

As soon as playback of recoded files is fine, I'll go on to BluRay playing.

Hopefully the GPU based decoding/rendering support will be out soon. It's in the works and I'm keeping an eye on the phoronix.com forums, where the new (open and proprietary) drivers are announced. I'll take whatever works first.

Update:
Since the BD+ decrypting is making fine progress, someone in the doom9 forums posted about running bluray with mplayer. I'll try this as soon as possible.

Update2:
There is now a new version of dumphd supporting BD+. Its not very user friendly yet. You have to use the BDVM debugger first and then you can input the conversion table into dumpHD (CLI-mode).
I'll try this as soon as possible on my htpc.

Update3:
Yesterday I bought a TP-Link WN651G pci wireless card with atheros chipset. It installed flawlessly and works great with in-kernel atheros (ath5k) drivers. I hereby recommend this card.

Update4:
Playing bluray discs directly (piping the output of dumpHD to mplayer) works great. My only non-BD+ bluray disc played almost perfectly. The HD-DVDs have slight stuttering mith -framedrop but without it the audio and video go out of sync. Next step will be to transcode the HD discs to -mkv and testing the newest BD+ libbluray solution.
For direct automated playing of blurays, I'm working on a script connecting dumphd, a buffer file and mplayer for playback.

Tariella · Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 11:52 am Post subject:

Its time for a new post. I made some great progress (well from my point of view).
HDMI-Audio out as standard output is working.

Until yesterday HDMI audio was working for me only in mplayer when I defined

gsmd · n00b Joined: 20 Jul 2008 Posts: 28

Could you plz tell:
1) kernel, alsa, fgrx versions
2) alsa config flags
3) sound-related kernel flags
4) what's (un)muted in alsamixer?

Can't get the damned sound-over-hdmi thing work on the very same mobo.
TIA.

Tariella · Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 12:06 pm Post subject:

The sound over HDMI was giving me some troubles at fist also. I was googling for hours to find a working solution.

Here is my config:
1)
kernel: linux-2.6.27-gentoo-r4
alsa: in-kernel
fglrx: ati-drivers-8.561

2)
aplay -l gives me:

gsmd · n00b Joined: 20 Jul 2008 Posts: 28

It did help. Thanks!

gallen · n00b Joined: 07 Apr 2009 Posts: 1

The HDMI audio problem described here is EXACTLY the issue I'm having with Linux Mint 6 at the moment. I'm a total linux noob and have spent far too many hours troubleshooting this...getting close to breaking down and buying the dreaded vista.

How do I go about writing/modifying a .asooundrc? And the kernel config? At the moment with alsamixer -c1, I don't have any volume controls just a check box for IEC958. Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

g-user · Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 10:12 am Post subject:

Tariella · Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 1:01 pm Post subject:

Sorry for the late answer but I was out of town for a while.

alatar · n00b Joined: 12 Feb 2009 Posts: 61

This topic could become a good How-to

Could you please post some details about general gentoo installation, like USE flags, HTPC frontend (mythTV, XBMC, else) - the latest decision and so? Especially me would be very pleased for such info.

Tariella · Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2009 1:45 pm Post subject:

It was my plan to develop this thread into a how-to like I did with my bluray thread. The project is not yet finished but I'll post details and status as it proceeds.

I decided to wait with the tv-tuner card until everything else is finished and working.
The frontend software is xbmc (which simply looks very sexy). There is an unified pvr frontend in development for xbmc and they support mythtv and vdr backends (the installation seems to be a little tricky though - another reason to wait with the tuner-hardware-decision).

To use my remote for powering my HTPC on (and off) I bought a chip from this page. It is pre-programmed and can also be bought in an already assembled state.
Mine was bought as a single chip and is now already assembled. I'll install it soon.

The keymapping will be edited by using gizmod. Ebuilds are in bugzilla and the sunrise overlay. There also exists a wiki.
Using gizmod I'll edit the way my remote control's button work for xbmc application specifically. I want to translate mouse movements to arrow keys for menu navigation.

The things that are on my todo-list are:
Customizing xbmc setup (choosing and setting up a skin, organizing and scraping media into xbmc database)
Installing the power-on-by-remote-chip.
Configure the already installed gizmod for xbmc specific functions.
Tuning the bootup process and adding a bootsplash.
Automatic startup of xbmc on boot.
Power management and suspend features.

Atm I'm organizing and scraping my media-data into the xbmc database. This takes some time. I also tried "external" media-scraping software to organize my media. This is very time consuming.

Details on my gentoo setup so far (kernel, USE-flags, xorg, drivers, automounting, and so on) will follow.

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5909

alatar · n00b Joined: 12 Feb 2009 Posts: 61

I am currently thinking about GA-E7AUM-DS2H motherboard with E5200 processor. I wonder would it play 2180p HDTV content?

Tariella · Posted: Tue Jun 30, 2009 8:10 am Post subject:

@DaggyStyle:
The problem with the 780g chipset is that not even the proprietary video driver supports the UVD video decoding (which is the pendant to nvidias VDPAU).
I'm still waiting for support.
Of course the processor is fast enough to decode HD videos on its own without help from the graphics device.

@alatar:
Here in Austria I don't even have 720p HDTV (only per DVB-S2, which I don't have), so I don't know about 2180p HDTV. Never heard of anything above 1080p though.

alatar · n00b Joined: 12 Feb 2009 Posts: 61

I do not think there are TV channels in that format, but I have some test videos encoded in 2160 (it is a Russian torrent as I am from Ukraine).

zoolook · n00b Joined: 05 Oct 2002 Posts: 16

Hi,

Tariella · Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 2:15 pm Post subject:

I'm running ~amd64 unstable with kernel 2.6.28 (fglrx graphics drivers don't support any higher version). Xbmc was installed with the xbmc-9999 ebuild from portage. No problems so far.
Last update of xbmc was about one or two weeks ago.

I'm running the in-kernel alsa drivers using the abovementioned .asoundrc; audio-output is through HDMI.