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Revision as of 11:30, 24 January 2013 by Tuju (talk | contribs) (Add f18 status.)

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

Software

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.

MythTV

Vlc

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

Media Explorer

Configuration

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.

People

nick f rel hw sw status notes
Messerting F11 Asus P5E-VM HDMI

Terratec Cinergy C HD PCI DVB-C

In use, but unstable True 1366x768 over HDMI, use "nomodeset" kernel parameter. xorg.conf

MythTV pre-0.22 (svn trunk), mantis driver from s2-liplianin.

tuju f10 + rawhide + fusion Asus P5E-VM HDMI vlc plays video, audio works through onboard RCA coaxial S/PDIF.
tuju f14 + fusion Asus P5E-VM HDMI xbmc plays video, audio works through onboard RCA coaxial S/PDIF. HDMI audio does not work out-of-the-box, don't know why.
tuju f15 + fusion Asus P5E-VM HDMI xbmc tested, didn't work, reverted to f14. kernel video driver i915 gives blank screen without nomodeset kernel parameter. If that is set, setting xorg resolution with xorg.conf or xrandr fails.
tuju f18 + fusion Asus P5E-VM HDMI, usb uirt xbmc, lirc, NFS 2013-01: issues with playback. Minimal system, no display manager, nor desktop. Starts with systemd to htpc target. Uses native Pulseaudio everywhere. Storage on NFS.

Issues: Playback speed too fast, audio stuttering with XBMC log error: WARNING: PulseAudio: Stream underflow.

hahlo F15 + fusion Biostar tp45 leadtek winfast 210 Video works well in Loewe 26" tv but no audio.

See also

External links