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by the MD's CPU. The core merely serves the files.

-Thom

Thanks so much Thom for this very useful info. That was my guess. So an older Mobo with a simple Pentium IV or Athlon XP with enough memory and quick drives should do the trick.
Am I right if I say that it will be the same for tuner cards installed on the Core?

You have to actually decode the MPEG stream... motion vectors, MBAFF, deinterlacing. etc

This kind of processing is exactly what video HW is for. Especially modern PC display chips, which are not only fast and have instructions tuned to the MPEG apps, but also have lots of parallelism. I wonder whether there's a way for a Core to harness a bank of nVidia chips to decode video into frames which aren't displayed locally, but streamed out to a relatively slow MD for display. Gonna need a fat fat LAN though.

If I may: as I am not a IT geek (but rather a professional user), I am not sure to understand: When files are stored on the core and displayed on a MD, where and how are they decoded? By the core's CPU? By the MD's CPU? or by the MD's GPU? In other words, where is processing power needed?

Sorry if my question looks stupid but I would be happy to understand.

Thanks

For sure Nokia770 is cheaper but the Orbiter should be optimized for it. N800 works fine, without any problems. But 770 crashes time to time (especially on DVD menu displaying). I suspect it happens because the Orbiter just compiled for 770 not optimized and 770 has limited resources. Moreover, 770 loses some good functionality because Nokia doesn't support it anymore. You can use just OS2007HE which is stable more or less. So, my suggestion to use N800. At least now.

Point taken. What about Win PDAs?

This is too bad. I would like to use a small touch screen on the MD to avoid having to switch on the plasma just to get access to music or radio. Any idea whether this feature is planned for addition?

You can use N800 for that

Indeed. Someone else already suggested this solution and I am inclined to use it. However, what about the N770. (it is cheaper) or even a PocketPC PDA.
What do you think?

It is possible to use videos downloaded by Miro in LinuxMCE already. You simply need to "fix" the permissions on the LinuxMCE videos folder (/home/public/videos/) and perhaps create a miro folder in there, then in the Miro options (on your Kubuntu desktop) point Miro to download to that folder (if you don't fix the permissions it won't let you change to that folder for saving). Once you do that, start downloading some videos and they'll show up in the Videos section of LinuxMCE shortly. The one downside (and a reason for more tightly integrating it) is that some shows don't use a nice file naming convention, they assume you'll be using the RSS for your metadata and so when looking in LinuxMCE all you'll see is some obscure filename. Thankfully many publishers are slightly smarter than that.

Thanks a lot for this very useful information. It is indeed a good starting point. I hope that tighter integration will nevertheless come at some point.

Do you know whether we can do something similar with podcasts using itunes from a winPC or any other application in linux?

Thanks

Last question: what will be needed in terms of hardware to get this going? (CPU, LAN, GC) 

Yes, you will probably need at least all three of those... 

Funny 

Why?
GPU decoding only works in Windows and OSx for anything other than basic XVMC in nvidia cards. Whether you have a 6200 or an 8600 the cpu usage will be the same

Actually, I was told that it was possible to get Linux use GPU decoding and therefore have a cheap mobo as a base? Am I wrong about this?

Last question: what will be needed in terms of hardware to get this going? (CPU, LAN, GC) 

Sorry guys! I did not mean to be rude to anyone. just asking questions and giving opinions. did not intend to be insulted either.
Can't we all calm down and get useful discussion here?

So my simple question is: is there any chance in the foreseeable future that HDDVD/Blu Ray be supported by LMCE? My understanding from this thread is no.
Am I wrong?

Yes... in LinuxMCE-0710 there is support for HD in the form of HD-DVD and BlueRay :-)

This is great news! What about everything which has been said above regarding DRM and so on? Will LMCE overcome that or not?

In addition what kind of CPU will be needed to tackle those DVDs?

Thanks a lot for this positive note. You made my day.

Sorry guys! I did not mean to be rude to anyone. just asking questions and giving opinions. did not intend to be insulted either.
Can't we all calm down and get useful discussion here?

So my simple question is: is there any chance in the foreseeable future that HDDVD/Blu Ray be supported by LMCE? My understanding from this thread is no.
Am I wrong?

oh waaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

waah waah waah

i've never heard so much crying in my life.

why don't you guys buck up and help us make this system better instead of waiting for someone to come along and do it?

-Thom

Sorry about that but I am just an end-user. (a free rider?) I guess people like me will have to put up with making MS always bigger while Linux will keep being a tool/playground for techies at least for a long while.
One day though...

I think without decent support for accelerated video playback it doesn't make sense to create a linux based media center at all, because a lot of movies (bluray / hddvd ) are already in hd format 1080p and i do think a media centre should support those formats. That was also the reason i bought a full HD screen television so i could play back movies at full resolution.

I fully agree with that: the whole point is to have only one unique solution for all medias. If HD is missing, there is no point in having a media center. I am afraid we will be stuck with MS and WMP for a while!
Too bad, LMCE is very promising.

Has anyone tried to use the Chumby (http://www.chumby.com/) as an orbiter.
It seems it has all the prerequisite while being open source and cheap.
Your opinion would be appreciated.

Has anyone tried to use Wine on a LMCE PC?
What is your experience?

Interesting discussion.
As a matter of fact, I am still not clear where CPU resources are needed: in the Core or in the MD?
Is this influenced by graphic cards with hardware encoding and/or digital tuner card? 
My guess is that these two should limit the loads on the core and/or MD CPUs.

Can one bring me up to speed on this matter?
Thanks