looking for HW for MD for new version of Pluto

[archived]

Hi,

I've posted initial info on search quest for best HW suitable for diskless MD on Wiki :

http://plutohome.elwiki.com/index.php/Media_Directors

I'd kindly ask other users to post info about various HW  you use under Pluto - I bet we can all find best HW for diskless MD under Pluto.

Yesterday I had brief talk with Aaron and he pointed out that new killer GUI is coming with new version of Pluto and NVidia 6xxx is needed for that...

HTH,

regards,

Rob.

[archived]

Rob,

I've been using a VIA Nehemehia mini-itx board with built-in TV/S-video out as my MD.  These boards are extremely small and quiet with network boot capability, hw mpeg video decoder, and great sound quality.  On the downside, they need Unichrome drivers for the video otherwise Xine (or any video program) will freeze and you need to hard reboot.  I have it running Gentoo with MythTV and it works great.

It shouldn't be too difficult to get the Unichrome drivers working with Pluto.  I'll'll put up a howto on plutohome.elwiki.com when I finally get around to doing this.  So far, I've no need since I still can't get files from my NAS to play using pluto!

Sevak

[archived]

Hi Sevak

the problem with video on VIA Nehemiah is that Unichrome drivers are no more providing XvMC (hardware acceleration) that has been stripped out and added to a fork project (Openchrome).

Unfortunately Openchrome drivers are for Xorg and not for Xfree86.

The good news is that some time ago I tried to replace Xfree86 with Xorg on my VIA hybrid (see my post -> http://plutohome.com/support/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=707) and everything worked fine.
My plan were to keep on working on that and adding openchrome drivers to my hybrid, but still had no chance to put some effort on it.

Nevertheless I can confirm that my VIA Nehemiah 10k hybrid has been working fine for the last 2 and a half months with Xorg and xine (both with DVD and DivX) without a single problem. I'm obviously not using hardware acceleration, but still I can watch my media (this is probably one of the reasons why I didn't force myself yet to find the time to deal with openchrome ... )

I cannot make any promises now, but completing my installation with openchrome drivers is still on my plan, so this is something that is going to happen sooner or later.

Regards
Marco

[archived]

Rob, you're right.  I forgot about it being XFree86 instead of xorg.

Your results from that previous post seem very promising.  I remember that when Gentoo switched from XFree86 to Xorg, I didn't need to reconfigure anything; I used my old X config file and it worked fine -as it should because they use the same parameters.  It would be cool to get it working on pluto the same way.  Maybe as simple as apt-get uninstall xfree86, apt-get install xorg & openchrome, check rc for boot up, delete old orbiter images and re-install orbiters instead of chrooting into them?  I imagine that the orbiters use whatever is available to them from the core.  I could be seriously wrong here and the orbiters pull from the online repositories instead.  Then chrooting would be appropriate.  Not as familiar with Debian as Gentoo, but doesn't Debian have something similar to make.conf with USE flags?

Sevak