Thanks to all for reply.

Unfortunately I've no spare SB or other sound card, so I think I will give a go to latest drivers /local playback.

Will keep you posted about progress (if any)

Thanks again and regards
Marco

Hi 1audio and thanks for your reply.

Here we go with specs:

Mobo is VIA EPIA M 10000, (C3 1gHz, CLE266 North Bridge, VT8235M South Bridge, 512 MB Ram).

MD is set to have "Standard sound card" and "Stereo" audio setting. Driver is snd_via82xx shipped with Kubuntu.

Alsamixer is ok, meaning that I already opened it and reduced all relevant level, with no effect on my issue.

We are not talking anyway about distortion. sound comes out with very clear chunks even at high volume interrupted by (I don't know the  tech word to explain ..) some "bumps"

I don't understand what you mean by "What else is running on the box". It is a standard MD, with UI1 interface and  is used only for audio/video playback.

If I go to KDE desktop and try to play any system sound I can notice the same problem. Also tried to play some mp3 with amarok, with same result. So it is not something related to xine itself, but something more general.

I know that VIA can sound very good, mine actually used to play a very clear sound under Pluto.

If you need some more details just drop a line.

Thanks again and regards
Marco

Hi Zaerc

I'm not a guru with Xorg conf, so most probably I'm missing something that you may find very obvious.

My Xorg.0.log looks like this:

Code:

(**) VIA(0): Display dimensions: (930, 530) mm
(**) VIA(0): DPI set to (21, 28)

Resolution is 800X600
Display dimension is correct, DPI I guess not.

Any clue?

TIA
Marco

Hi Ayster

the Unichrome Pro II drivers are (so far) the only drivers supporting UI2.

Unfortunately they are not public, so there's no option to have them unless you buy a Fiire hw.

HTH
Marco

Hi Ayster

in the early Pluto days (the ancestor of LMCE) I started my testing with a VIA EPIA M 10000.
I also tried Mythtv but result were not brilliant, probably because at that time MythTv integration was very rough and unstable.

Then I moved my hybrid on a dedicated box, so my VIA box became (an still is) a regular diskless MD.
I had to tamper a bit to have decent video performances but in the end the result was good using Openchrome drivers.

With LMCE things are a bit different. Openchrome drivers (shipped with Kubuntu) are giving some problems. In my case they are crashing MD when watching divx files, so I had to move to Unichrome Pro drivers (you can easily find in this forum some useful pointers on this matter).

Note that with Unichrome Pro you cannot have UI2, as this interface is only supported by Unichrome Pro II drivers that have been licensed from VIA to Fiire.

As Eloy said, if your family is used to rely on MythTv I guess that killing you working system and reinstalling as LMCE would be a risky option.
I never used Mythdora, but from what I've read i think that in terms of "horse power" requirements LMCE tends to be more demanding that your actual system, and this may negatively impact on performances.

I don't mean to be discouraging, but I think you better find a way to introduce a new "electronic friend" to your wife 

Just my 0.02

Regards
Marco

Hi all

I have followed the hints found on wiki pages, but still my fonts are extremely small.

I'm trying to display fonts on a 42" plasma tv, so I put the following in my xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
  ...
  DisplaySize 900 500
EndSection

Even rebooting MD does not change anything.

Anyone else with the same issue?

TIA
Marco

Hi all

on a VIA based MD I'm getting bad quality audio, no matter what the source is.
Either audio from DVD, or from avi files or from mp3 files comes out with a lot of "bumps" and "clicks".

I've tampered a bit with sound configuration (increased buffer, encoder priority, encoder quality) but no avail. Any sound (including system sound) is coming out badly.

The very same MD used to play a very clear audio with Pluto, so I guess the issue has something to do with configuration or maybe drivers.

Anyone is experiencing something similar?
Anyone has some hints?

TIA
Marco

Hi William

I'm afraid you can't. Fiire is using Unichrome Pro II drivers, that VIA licensed to them. Those drivers are not public, so if you want to have a VIA based MD with UI2 you have to buy one from Fiire.

On your VIA MD you can anyway compile and install Unichrome Pro drivers, that in the experience of many user are quite good even if they don't support UI2.

You may refer to this post

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=2519.0

for more information about dowloading Unichrome drivers ad compiling them

HTH

Marco

I have CM11 with serial interface and it is working fine.

HTH
Marco

Hi Raoul

just an idea on what your issue may be.
LMCE has a  flickr based screen saver, that downloads new images from flickr site. Maybe this is somehow disturbing your router and causing disconnections. I know that some router are sensitive to continous download (my router for example does not like aMule ...).

If this is the case, you may solve your problem upgrading your router firmware or disabling pictures download. you can achieve this last option by renaming flickr.pl in /usr/pluto/bin

There are other posts in this forum talking about customizing flickr images that you may want to read.

HTH
Marco

Hi Thom

just to clarify my idea:

keeping a MD on all the time is something that has to do with the importance you give to the services that are hooked to it and the price you agree to pay for it.

By an "energy balance" point of view LMCE is pretty power consuming. You are supposed to have a full blown server running 24x7 and a small energy fingerprint pc for each MD that you want in your environment.

This makes a discrete amount of bucks in energy cost at the end of the year.

In my country electric power is not that cheap and government is promoting a lot of incentives for "low energy home", and as far as I'm concerned I wouldn't mind if I can reduce all power consumption that in my opinion is not strictly required.

In another post there was a discussion about lowering CPU freq of Core/hybrid, in order to decrease power consumption in off-peak hours. I think that also the hybernation topic was already mentioned before. This means that energy saving is somehow an issues that more than one user start to consider, especially now that we have a reasonably stable environment and users are more keen to think about "fine tuning".

In my environment (that may probably differs from yours) the only reason that would suggest me to keep MD on is the "follow me feature". All the rest (lighting control, basically) is hooked to Core. I use MD only as media player and nothing more.

So in principle I need MD switched on only during the time frame when I'm at home.

Actually something that I would like (and as soon as I solve other bigger issue I surely try to get) is something that turns on MD at a given time, and that turns MD off when leaving home.

As I told in the beginning, this is my point of view.

Maybe this is a limited perspective, so if you have different idea share it with us.

Regards
Marco

Hi Thom

a reason for switching off MD could be power saving. Say that nobody is at home from 8.00 AM to 6.00 PM, wouldn't be a real power waste to keep all your MD on ?

Regards

Marco

Hi Stingly

Mobile Orbiter is working on Nokia N70. I've tried myself so I'm sure about it.
On Nokia site I didn't find whether N73 is running S60 v3 or v2, so (if you didn't already) maybe it's worth a try.
Keep us posted
Regards
Marco

Hi Zaerc

I have to buy one, but so far I've seen only 3 button gyro mouse and this stopped me so far from purchasing.

Can you tell me which brand/model of gyro mouse do you have in your LMCE environment?

TIA
Marco

Thanks all for your reply

actually performances with standard drivers are not that bad with DVD playback, but I'm experiencing serious problems with DivX.
Basically when playing DivX my VIA MD crashes on a regular basis, sometimes after few seconds, sometimes after 40 minutes playback.
I couldn't find any relevant trace into logs, apart of this error occurring at boot time:

[drm:via_mem_alloc] *ERROR* Attempt to allocate from uninitialized memory manager.

Googling around I've found (very few) indications that this may be a bug in the via driver, so I guess I've no other options that going for Via Unichrome Pro drivers.

Here comes the crucial question: is the .config file shipped with kernel sources/header of Kubuntu 7.04 the correct one to use for compiling additional drivers/modules?
Or does this file need some changes?

TIA
Marco