New Media Dirrector

[archived]

I am going to purchase some hardware and make a dedicated Media Director that boots from the network and pulls data over the network for TV ect. I want to avoid any hard drives in each director as it takes power and I am trying to make a fan less system that takes very little power. Plus one main goal is centralized data.

The media director will be used as an orbiter as well in rooms where there is no orbiter.

Am I dreaming? There are some flash hard drives that range from 256MB to 4GB that fit into an IDE slot. If I need to have some storage for images that are rendered for the orbiter then that is fine does anyone know what the max size I would need?

[archived]

Has anyone used a VIA EPIA Mini-ITX mobo in thier media dirrectors?

The seem like they would make for a decent media director mobo.

[archived]

Has anyone used a VIA EPIA Mini-ITX mobo in thier media dirrectors?

The seem like they would make for a decent media director mobo.

Hi,

I have 3 of them in such use. Only sp8000e works, but without decent Video support (driver or X should be customized) and also volume control seem to be not working (but that's probably minor SW problem).

Other two are me6000 and m9000 - they both have a so called i686 bug (they present themselves as i686 device and then exits imediately after that). Some time ago I had manual hack, to load i386 kernel instead, but now I compiled new i386 kernel, but currently you cannot override kernel settings from web page - so they are not in function for now....

Also same video problems exist for both those mobos... Also epias could have problems with waking on lan (depends on mobo)...

I wish I'd have more knowledge of Linux and do need changes to get video support working properly.... Anyone with more experience ?

HTH,

Regards,

Rob.

[archived]

Hi,

I saw important update on mythtv mailing list regarding support for cn400 chipsets on Epias - things are progressing, drivers are here (guy also posted .conf file).

Quoting:

The xorg.conf for EPIA motherboards changes a lot depending on which
driver, etc.  This one is actually for use with the Open Chrome
(www.openchrome.org) drivers, which if you are using an SP board you
should be using instead of the Unichrome drivers built into the kernel,
as those are really only meant for the EPIA-M motherboards.  Good luck
with this - it is the end result of many months of tweaking.  It has
lirc support built in but will allow for a failure of either the primary
mouse or the lirc mouse without dying.

Good Luck!
Warren


*Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier    "Default Layout"
        Screen        "Screen0"
        InputDevice   "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice   "LIRC-Mouse" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice   "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option     "DontVTSwitch"
        Option     "AllowMouseOpenFail"
EndSection


Section "Files"
  RgbPath       "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
  ModulePath    "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"
  FontPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
  FontPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
  FontPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
  FontPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID/"
  FontPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
  FontPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
  Load          "glx"
  Load          "record"
  SubSection    "extmod"
    Option      "omit xfree86-dga"
  EndSubSection
  Load          "dbe"
  Load          "xtrap"
  Load          "freetype"
  Load          "type1"
  Load          "dri"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier    "Keyboard0"
  Driver        "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Mouse0"
        Driver      "mouse"
        Option "Protocol"    "IMPS/2"
        Option "Device"      "/dev/input/mice"
        Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
        Option "Buttons"     "5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "LIRC-Mouse"
        Driver      "mouse"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/lircm"
        Option      "Protocol" "IntelliMouse"
        Option      "SendCoreEvents"
        Option      "Buttons" "5"
        Option      "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier    "Monitor0"
  VendorName    "Monitor Vendor"
  ModelName     "Monitor Model"
  HorizSync     20 - 90
  VertRefresh   50.0 - 75.0
  ModeLine      "720x480" 26.7  720 736 808 896  480 481 484 497
  Modeline      "720x480Over" 21.0  720 728 760 800  480 480 483 525
-HSYNC +VSYNC
EndSection

Section "Device"
  Identifier    "Via Unichrome CN400"
  Driver        "via"
  Option        "ActiveDevice"  "TV"
  Option        "TVType"        "NTSC"
  Option        "TVOutput"      "S-Video"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
  Mode          0666
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier    "Screen0"
  Device        "Via Unichrome CN400"
  Monitor       "Monitor0"
  DefaultDepth  16
  Subsection    "Display"
    Depth       16
    #Modes       "720x480"
    Modes       "720x480Over"
  EndSubSection
EndSection
*
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[archived]

Hi Rob

The xorg.conf for EPIA motherboards changes a lot depending on which
driver, etc. This one is actually for use with the Open Chrome  ...

The .conf file you are quoting unfortunately refers to Open Chrome driver, that is developed for Xorg.

AFAIK Pluto is tied to Xfree86 and in general with vanilla Debian, so I'm afraid that at the moment those conf are useless for any Pluto user.

I don't have either that much familiarity with linux, but I guess the proper and more consistent way to have good video support for EPIA based box would be to move to Xorg.

One of my early experiment has been to install from scratch a Debian Sarge on my EPIA box, replacing Xfree86 with Xorg and compiled some drivers against a Xorg tree (no Pluto installed, just plain Debian). The result with Xine was amazing, smooth video with low CPU usage, working like a charm. So things CAN be better than actually are, at least for EPIA video support.

The point is that I don't have any idea on how many things would break in Pluto because of this change and how difficult it would be to make them working again.

As I've placed several times question like this on this forum but so far I didn't get any reply, I'm starting to think that this may be a very tough task that is beyond the actual scope of work of Pluto developers.

Nevertheless It would be interesting to have just an opinion about it ...

A different (and possibly unsuccessful) approach would be to try to compile openchrome drivers against Xorg and use them with Xfree86, but again I don't know how possible (or silly) would be this.

Regards
Marco