The full address is:
Inverawe Farmhouse
Persley - Grandhome
Aberdeen
AB22 8AQ
United Kingdom
The house, from the road, looks like this:
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Pour l’instant, juste un page ou je jette les idées plus ou moins en vrac… Deviendra propre et illustrée plus tard
Dernière mise a jour : Vendredi 7 Novembre 2008
<insérer photo du salon>
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À FAIRE FABRIQUER
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À FABRIQUER
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<insérer image du modèle 3D>
À FABRIQUER
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Photo J. Théodule
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Latest update: November 17, 2008 - rev.1
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- Features
- Software
- Hardware
- Diagram
- Toshiba Regza X Series 37X3030DB 37″ (94cm) Full HD LCD TV
- Logitech Harmony 720 universal remote control
- Thermaltake Mozart SX case
- Seasonic S12II 380 W power supply
- Intel DG965WH motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 microprocessor - 64 bit, 4 MB cache, 2.66 MHz, 1066 MHz FSB
- Zalman CNPS8700 NT CPU cooler
- SilenX iXtrema Pro 80mm 14 dBA 32 CFM fans
- A-Data memory - 1 GB (2x 512 MB) PC6400 (800 MHz) DDR2
- Thermaltake PCI-E and PCI riser extenter kit
- Western Digital Caviar GP WD10EACS 1 TB, 16 MB cache, SATA-II hard drive
- Sony DRU-500a DVD reader/writer
- Matrix Orbital VK202-24-USB Intelligent VFD
- Hauppauge WinTV NOVA-T-500 dual DVB-T tuners PCI Digital terresrial TV card
- KWORLD DVB-S 100 DVB-S tuner PCI Digital satellite TV card
- PNY nVidia GeForce 7100 GS - 128 MB - PCI Express 16x with DVI-HDMI adapter
- Interlink RF keyboard and mouse combo
- DIY TV and components stand
- On-board Intel video status
- Installation and setup notable details and specifics
- Ubuntu install through the live CD does not set the boot flag on any partition
- Reported issues with the Marvel PATA/IDE disk controller
- Intel is absolutely Linux-friendly, in more ways than one
- Audio using the optical digital output (S/PDIF)
- Wrong audio stream, bad A/V sync and stuttering picture on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disc dumps
- DVB cards order
- Keeping MythTV fresh and stable
- Not losing one of the Nova-T-500’s tuners
- OpenVPN Gateway
- List of files of interest
- MythWeb bugs encountered and fixed
- AAC, H.264, AC3 with ffmpeg
- Smoother picture motion
- Technology wishlist
I have built a Home Theater PC (HTPC), in order to replace the Tivo box I was using when living in Houston, which changed the way we approached watching TV.
Mythbuntu, a derivative of Ubuntu Linux - Great Linux distribution with a very active team build around providing a very easy MythTV implementation, with extensive documentation. Using the 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) release at this time.
MythTV - For the time being the most complete media center open source application. Its list of features and capabilities is quite amazing. Its configuration and use can sometime be a bit overwhelming, though. But it’s well worth it, and projects like Mythbuntu are helping a lot. Using the 0.21-fixes version at this time.
Elisa may be a better replacement, rather sooner than later, because of its approach and targets, but it has a long way to go to be as full of features. MythTV has time to correct a few of its legacy until then.
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A Samsung model was planned, but its design got vetoed by my better half.
Got a great deal at the local Costco.
Full 1080p HD through HDMI.
Has a VESA mount that is used with the DIY stand (read below).
[link]
Great web interface, easy to setup and customize, even knew about the Hauppauge remote codes.
Deals with the PC, the TV and the receiver automatically using tasks.
[link]
I got a nice deal on this case, as a second-hand product. It is slim, has no volume button, does not look too bad (but it is not that nice looking either…), and is fitting OK in a hi-fi environment.
It comes with a PCI Express x16 and two PCI slots riser, translating the slots form vertical to horizontal.
There is a semi-dark window in the front panel, which is nice for the VFD.
[link]
This power supply replaced an Antec model that failed after one year (as warned about in the comments) and made too much noise anyway.
This one is quite silent indeed. On the other hand, it does not have a modular cables system, and it was quite tough to fit all the extra unused cables in the small case.
[link]
Intel quality and stability, no fans, great on-board and automatic control for the case fans, optical digital audio output, HD Audio digital header for the sDVO/ADD2 cart (good for the sound part in the HDMI link), and a more than good enough on-board video card, including hardware-accelerated OpenGL, that can have TV outputs through the sVDO/ADD2 system.
[link]
Let’s say I had the opportunity for the best possible deal for this great processor (thanks again Steve!).
It was the current top of the line of its series at the time of acquisition, and the extra power is put to use with the MPEG-2 and other HDTV (VC-1, H.264) software decoding.
[link]
I used to have the Thermaltake Golden Orb II CPU cooler, as it was recommended to be used with the case. Unfortunately it is noisy and cannot be controlled by the motherboard as it lacks the PWM feature.
The Zalman is PWM-capable (using a 4 wires cable) and is very silent. It will spin up and make some more noise when the machine is under load, which is OK, as this happens only when watching HD content with sound.
The case is quite cramped and I needed to cut off a few fins with scissors as well as a major chunk of the holding clip with the Dremel in order to make the cooler fit next to the power supply.
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The case needs two case fans, one blowing in, one blowing out, and located close to the hard drives.
This is the third attempt at making the system quieter, and it works!
Those are pricey as fans go, I hope that they last at least a year before they become noisy again.
I couldn’t use the provided rubber mounts, as it was not practical withing the case configuration, I had to use regular screws. I used rubber parts to still provide some vibrations isolation between the case and the fans.
I believe that the motherboard is also capable of throttling those fans by varying the voltage supplied to them.
[link]
The Intel boards are known to demand very specific RAM modules.
These are known to work with my motherboard, and were the cheapest with those specs.
1 Gigabyte is way too much, only half of it is really used, but it is hard to find 512 MB in 2x 256 MB modules…
This is my luck… The Thermaltake web site says that you should only need those when using a MicroATX motherboard, and that forced me into looking into a full-size ATX model.
But my Intel motherboard still needs this kit. That is a real bummer, as I am having difficulties find anyone who stocks this kit.
Ah, Thermaltake has an on-line shop. It is well hidden, I have to say, but a phone call made sure I had the secret URL!
Oh, one last thing, quite illogical. This kit is made specifically for my case. My case has that riser, with 2x PCI slots, and 1x PCI-E 16x slot. The extender kit has only 1x PCI and 1x PCI-E 16x extenders. So either I ordered 1 kit and lost the use of 1 PCI slot, or ordered 2 kits, for twice the money, and got left with an extra PCI-E extender… I went for the more expensive solution.
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Super silent.
More than fast enough.
Tons of space.
“Payment” for services rendered (Merci Stéphane ! )
It is probably the best range of hard drives that can be used in a Home Theater PC.
It holds:
Old stock I had. Not perfect, not perfectly fitting (I had to remove the vertical part at the front of the tray), but will have to do for the time being. Connected using a slim and round PATA cable.
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VFD, as opposed to LCD, is bright enough, and contrasty enough. This provides a good display through the semi-dark window in the front of the case. Mythlcdserver feeds it information. Connected to a spare internal USB header on the motherboard.
This thing works like a charm and really add a nice touch. It is completely unnecessary, but I had to have it!
This display became faulty. It display quite a lot of gibberish around the legitimate stuff. I have contacted the manufacturer, and I have to say that I am very impressed by the good quality of their support so far. Those are very friendly, open and helping people. There has been an RMA.
Also noteworthy is the fact that the Gutsy lcdproc version introduces a regression bug that manifests itself on this kind of display. I had to revert to the Feisty version. I have created a bug report for the package in Ubuntu. This has been fixed for Hardy.
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It needs the latest DVB kernel tree from LinuxTV, then it works very well
I had to use an option for the kernel module in order to turn on the on-board amplifier (LNA).
See the LinuxTV wiki page for this card, you will get the proper information to get everything working. I have witnessed some pretty nice guys developing and polishing this driver in just a few months
Both tuners work.
I add to have a masthead amplifier installed, my signal was not good enough.
The remote is supported by LIRC and all keys work. Quite easy, I just had to adapt a few files like lircd.conf, .lircrc and other files. You can find the relevant files here.
While I’m still using the infrared receiver, the remote’s functions were moved over to the Logitech Harmony.
you may want to read about some settings I used in MythTV below.
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Works out of the box, no tweak, no firmware. Just works!
I’m using a 90cm dish with a simple universal LNB, pointed at the Hotbird 13°E group of satellites. The goal is to get a few free-to-air French channels, mostly TV 5.
It’s Composite/S-Video input could be useful with the LaserDisc player I still have around.
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This replaces the on-board video for the time being. At least it was quite cheap. There is no need for a powerful video card for this task.
Sure it needs closed source code, I am quite annoyed by that, but at the moment Intel does not cut it yet.
I’m hoping to get rid of this card in time.
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All the system is normally used with the remote control. Sometimes, though, it is nice to have a mouse and a keyboard.
Radio Frequencies work better than Infrared, there is no need for line of sight.
I can use the keyboard and mouse from the couch.
I salvaged this equipment from the trash at work.
I bought a TV wall mount from Amazon.co.uk at a relatively fair price.
I have pictures of the build in progress here:
I have added an extension that supports my Bose satellite speakers. Fugly sound, but they still are practical with an installation without too much space taken.
Finally, two cable trays somehow manage the mess and prevent any spaghetti incidents.
My original plan was to use the on-board Intel video. After all, it is supposed to have enough punch for the task, it is fan-less and the nice add-on card trick providing more output types is an elegant solution.
When I deployed the system, though, the driver (2.1 at the time) still had a lot of issues. The developers on the xorg mailing list were very helpful but still the code needed to mature some more. I thus bought a cheap nVIDIA card in order to fill the gap.
I am still very confident that Intel will be the way to go in the very short term. The hardware is capable of many things, like resolution, fast enough 3D for bling interfaces and all the hardware acceleration you could wish for (MPEG-2, H.264, etc…). Recent news are confirming my thoughts: Intel released the full specs that used to be reserved to only a few, there is the XvMC branch of the driver, there is the effort on the VA-API.
I’m planning on testing the 2.2 version of the intel driver with the next Ubuntu release (Hardy Heron).
I’m “parking” my previous notes here in the mean time.
[link]
The ADD2 system is a great idea. It extends the on-board video card with additional outputs, like DVI or TV. I can get all the TV outputs I want for less than $50, instead of having to buy an high-end discrete video card costing more than $200.
It comes in a nice kit. Does Composite (RCA), components (RCA), S-Video (mini-DIN), HDTV (components, RCA) and HDMI, with a cable to link to the digital audio header on the motherboard, plus brackets for either normal or low-rise slots.
The HDMI implementations in High Definition TVs is really not as good as in computer monitors. Especially the EDID thing. The EDID information is most of the time not sent by the TV, hence preventing proper configuration of X. I had to go manual and use a ModeLine for 1080p:
Modeline "1080p" 148.50 1920 2448 2492 2640 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync
This one is weird. You go through a full setup and then reboot, expecting to end up with a perfectly running system, like you had since the beginning of time. But no, the BIOS tells you that it cannot find any bootable media. Aaaargh! I am not the only on facing this issue with Intel boards.
The solution is quite easy, and should have been obvious to someone with a bit of Linux experience… But not this time. More alert people had to point it to me. Just boot with a Live CD again, use any partitioning tool you know well (fdisk, cfdisk, Gnome Partition Manager, etc…) and set the boot flag on the correct partition. Reboot. Voila!
This must be a bug specific to some Intel boards. I have filed a bug on theUbuntu bug tracking system.
Well, at least in Feisty AMD64, this one looks solved. My DVD drive looks very functional without specific parameters passed to the kernel at boot time.
What a nice surprise! We all knew Intel’s stance towards Open Source: friendly and active. It has been proven again when I upgraded the BIOS of my motherboard using the CD ISO images provided on their web site. I was expecting a good old floppy emulation starting up a DOS session. Nope! I saw a Linux kernel boot before the flash upgrade! So, not only does Intel participate with drivers, but they do use the penguin as well in their own processes.
I’m using a Yamaha Home Theater Receiver for all sound output. I use it to play everything and decode Stereo, Dolby Surround, AC-3 (Dolby Digital) and DTS through the optical digital input.
There are a few configuration tricks.
That was rather easy, in the General Frontend setup, I set the outputs to “ALSA:spdif”, and ticked the AC-3 and DTS pass-through options.
That was a tiny bit more involved, I had to edit the system-wide /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf file.
First, I had to tell it to use S/PDIF for everything:
# Specify default audio driver (see -ao help for a list).
ao=alsa:device=spdif
Just to make sure, I forced the other pass-throughs:
# Specify default audio codec (see -ac help for a list).afm=hwac3
ac=hwac3,hwdts,mad,
I had endless issues with playing properly those type of files, generally TS (MPEG transport streams) including VC-1 video, TrueHD or other advanced multi-channel soundtrack, and a more classic AC-3 (Dolby digital) soundtrack.
First, there is no going around it, you need a recent MPlayer, RC2 is a minimum, you need the ffvc1 video codec form recent ffmpeg libraries. win32codecs is a no-no for me on my 64-bit system, and I have experienced issues with the Windows DLLs anyway on 32-bit systems.
You may want to select the proper audio stream if your decoder does not support the latest and greatest stuff.
The bad audio sync and image stutturing was solved by using two settings:
To make that work, I am making specific configuration files for each movie, automatically selected by MPlayer, and overriding the system-wide options, by using files in the same directory as the movie, following the <movie file name>.conf convention:
# don't hog the logs too muchquiet=yes# We need XV, as XVMC does not support VC-1 or H-264
vo=xv
# This usually is the stream ID for the English Dolby Digital audio, my amp does not do the latedt HD stuff (yet)
aid=4133
# Play full screen by default
fs=yes
# You may want that if the movie is not at the same resolution as your TV
# zoom=yes
# Make sure the audio goes through the digital s/pdif output
afm=hwac3
ac=hwac3,hwdts,mad,
# Aggressively re-sync audio and video
autosync=30
# Force the proper frame-rate
fps=23.976
The DVB-T card with both its tuners was intalled inside the system a long time before the DVB-S card.
The system was configured knowing that id 0 and id 1 were DVB-T.
Unfortunately, when the DVB-S card was added, it took first place, becoming id 0, the DVB-T stuff becoming id 1 and id 2. That messed-up MythTV, obviously.
There is a simple trick that forces the kernel to first install the DVB-T driver, then the DVB-S driver. Edit the /etc/modprobe.d/options files, and add:
# Load DVB-T before DVB-S
install cx88-dvb /sbin/modprobe dvb-usb-dib0700; /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install cx88-dvb
It plain English, this means: In order to load the DVB-S driver (cx88-dvb), load first the DVB-T driver (dvb-usb-dib0700), then simply load the DVB-S driver (cx88-dvb), ignoring this condition.
Of course, if you are installing from scratch with both cards from the get-go, this is not necessary.
I have added the Mythbuntu repository for the weekly builds based on MythTV 0.21-fixes.
This brings me regular fixes without compromising the stability of my system.
There is a bug somewhere. Probably in the driver or the card’s firmware. The result is that a tuner stops. The main issue is that it stops silently, and MythTV continues to use it as if it was fine. You end up with recorded programs of zero length.
I stabilized the system and went around this by doing three things:
Here is how to do this:
I have not been losing any tuner or any recording since I’ve done that.
The machine was the target of my basic TCP/22 port redirection used for SSH. I got tired of opening a gazillion tunnels through SSH…
I have now setup the HTPC machine as a full OpenVPN gateway, as it is the only machine guaranteed to be ON all the time in the house. This was surprisingly quick and easy to setup, with aCertificate Authority and all the nice security features.
Remote VPN clients are all Linux machines too, and benefit from the integration with NetworkManager.
I can now access my home network from anywhere, completely transparently, as if I was there! 
I have various files in this directory, xorg config and logs, dmesg, lspci, lsusb, as well as various v4l-dvb patches for my NOVA-T-500, MPlayer config, etc…
Ffmpeg and its supporting libraries for non-free codecs is now removed from Medibuntu. This is because Ubuntu now ships alternative supporting libraries with the -unstripped appended to the packages names.
You have to change the internal clock’s resolution by adding the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf
dev.rtc.max-user-freq=1024
NVIDIA announced that it would be supporting hardware acceleration of HD video on Linux using a selection of graphics cards. I have to have one of those, as Intel is not delivering yet. Fanless is quite a plus.
My keyboard is OK, but big and bulky. A smaller, bluetooth-driven model would be nice.
I guess that the next step will be to build a NAS running OpenFiler on a few TB of RAID disks.
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