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Introduction Determining your needs Basic Hardware Audio Video Video Card Configuration LIRC Input Devices TV/HDTV Tuner Cards Installing Linux HTPC Software HTPC Tips and Tricks Conclusion |
Linux HTPC How-toLinux HTPC SoftwareThe frontendA good HTPC has a single frontend software application that handles everything. The frontend should be easy to understand, navigate, and functional. The frontend is also responsible for launching other applications if external functionality is needed. There are two frontends for Linux that do this, Freevo and MythTV. Freevo is a Tivo like application that is aimed at providing the same PVR and DVR like features. MythTV provides the same functionality as Freevo, but it also provides many others also. MythTV is being developed a good bit faster than Freevo, but Freevo is still a good application. Because of this, I recommend MythTV.MythTVMythTV is fairly easy to install. The great people of MythTV have wonderful documentation that would make covering the full install here pointless.In short here is what has to be done to get MythTV working. You need to download and install the main MythTV package. If you want to compile it yourself you need to have the correct development packages installed also. Once MythTV is installed you can add on extra modules. These extra modules add features from DVD viewing and ripping, listening to music, being able to control MythTV from over the Internet, getting weather information, and playing different games via xmame. Once the modules are installed you need to setup MythTV. Make sure you have mysql running (and the mythconverg database has been loaded, which is normally done by RPM or Debian package install. The MythTV document explains this). Next you have to run the myth setup program to select your Tuner Cards, your TV Broadcast Listing and so on. Once you are done press Esc to exit and run mythfrontend. Explore the settings and functionality in MythTV and enjoy. MythTV features include:
tvtimetvtime is a high quality television application for use with video capture cards. tvtime processes the input from a capture card and displays it on a computer monitor, projector, TV, or HDTV.tvtime does realtime video deinterlacing for x86-based GNU/Linux systems. tvtime was the first deinterlacer application under Linux to provide full rate output at 59.94fps for NTSC (or 50fps for PAL). For NTSC sources, tvtime includes 2-3 pulldown detection and inversion for highest quality output of film source material. tvtime supports a 16:9 anamorphic input mode for scaling video, and can happily output to a non-square pixel display device. For computer monitors, data projectors or televisions with VGA input, tvtime provides the highest quality visual experience when playing from a NTSC or PAL capture card. For PVR systems which output to a television, tvtime has a special interlaced display mode. In this mode, no deinterlacing is performed, but it work directly with the TV encoder chip to ensure that correct field parity is maintained for broadcast-quality display: top fields sent as top fields, bottom fields as bottom fields, in order. This currently works directly with the TV encoder driver for the Matrox G400, G450 and G550 cards in the DirectFB project. tvtime has been working with authors of PVR systems for integration as a display component. For the freevo project, tvtime has added a slave mode and krister has done a special tvtime controller component for live TV viewing. Miguel Freitas of the xine project has put together a tvtime deinterlacer plugin as a post processor, and this is the first experiment on efficiently processing 4:2:0 sources like MPEG2 video. tvtime uses deinterlacing algorithms from the GPL licensed Windows application DScaler, the ffmpeg project, the mplayer project, and from their own developers. The 2-3 pulldown detection algorithms in tvtime were developed by Billy Biggs and Richard Felker. They use wine for loading the DScaler DLLs, using the libwine fork from the xine project. tvtime also supports lirc for remote control input. Finally, tvtime uses freetype for text rendering, helped by its own subpixel glyph positioning code and compensation for non-square pixel framebuffers. This allows it to composite high quality text even if its output surface is a 16:9 480x480 pixel buffer. If you want to do any digitizing of old video tapes, get the best picture from NTSC TV, or improve the quality of video from a console game you should get tvtime. Xine, Mplayer, and MencoderXine and Mplayer are both geared towards providing the best and most video and audio codec support possible. Each support over 100 different video and audio codecs. For me, I used Xine for watching DVD's before MythTV had this support. The Xine DVD functionality is better than that in mplayer. Mplayer though is easier to use if you just want to watch a quick video clip.Mplayer also has a companion application Mencoder that encodes video and audio. MythTV uses mencoder as its transcoder. A transcoder can take any video or audio codec and re-encode it into another to get better compression. You can also use transcoding to help improve the video quality slightly using the same type of algorithms in tvtime. Although this helps some, it can't recreate data perfectly in an image that was lost when it was first created. Deinterlacer is a common algorithm that is used while transcoding NTSC or some ATSC/HDTV formats. I have MythTV take my HDTV recordings that are 18GB/hr and transcode them with mencoder to a specific resolution, do deinterlacing if needed, and save it in newer codecs that produce a file is about 1.5GB/hr. I do loose some quality but it's the max resolution that my DLP projector supports. |