HTPC

= Fedora Home Theater PC =

Fedora HTPC is about building a Home Theater system based on Fedora distribution. A HTPC system should require as few installation intervention as possible. Ideally, that would be a kickstart profile with bare required software packages and booting the system up. As a goal, that has not been reached yet.

Discussion
Currently active people can be found from #fedora-htpc@freenode irc channel.

Hardware
Asus P5E-VM HDMI

P5E-VM HDMI is one of the first motherboards capable of outputting audio through HDMI interface and thus good choice for HTPC platform.

Video
It has Intel G35 Chipset which needs the xorg-x11-drv-intel X-driver package.

Fedora 10/rawhide drivers have problems (bug #496614) with hanging video and thus one needs to be sure what version of intel driver is used. Following drivers are known to work:

2.6.0-14.fc11

Audio
P5E-VM has RealTek ALC883 audio chip. Supporting kernel modules are:

snd_hda_codec_intelhdmi snd_hda_codec_realtek snd_hda_intel snd_hda_codec

XBMC
Some pkg deps are missing, like glxinfo. Automatic startup is missing. Pulseaudio startup is missing.

VDR
VDR is terminal for digital-TV broadcasting. Because of that - it needs a receiver card to start up. Even it has a lot of features and plugins suitable for media server, card reuquirement in cases where receiving is not done, complicates things.

Vlc
If using S/PDIF digital output, the option --spdif option must be given.

Media Explorer

 * http://media-explorer.org/

XBMC
Xbmc can be run with window management system on desktop or in barebone embedded system with minimum system daemons as standalone dedicated media terminal. For that role xbmc package contains a startup script /usr/bin/xbmc-standalone that should be put somewhere. Typical instructions include it into role-user's home directory's .xinitrc as:

exec /usr/bin/xbmc-standalone

It's unsure could that be done somewere as drop-in link/file in some sort conf.d under /etc.