Messages

Hi,

I've just installed beta2 and my box is am MSI Live box, which is connect to my tv through the svideo connection.  How can configure the video wizard to switch to svideo without a monitor being plugged in to the box.  I have a mouse and keyboard connect, I've also got an fiire chief remote handy

regards

Sam

hi,

Was just curious if anyone ever got a Bluetooth headset working with linuxmce or Bluetooth stereo headphones.  There is just so many times where I wox like my own private audio watching a movie.

Regards,

Sam

hi,

I've been using my N810 as an orbiter. All I can say is it's slightly faster. A few seconds less than 10s. WAF very low

hi,

A the days go by I've been more and more loosing hope of my zwave devices working as I'm struggling to find someone who will ship direct to South Africa. 

From the way this thread is going I take it since I don't have a remote, I might aswell throw my ZCU201 in the bin? Because I don't mind even trying 810 alpha if there's hope?

Best regards

Sam

rtorrent make a nice torrent download.  I've configured it to download any .torrent files i place in my ~/downloads folder.  Also i've got some RSS feeds for podcasts and TV Shows that it automatically download.

What ideas did you have for the orbitor Thom, i think that would be a nice touch.

br

Sam

My prayer is Phonon improves, as it will support various back-ends so we don't need to worry about mplayer plays HD better than Xine and what not..

I haven't looked at Phonon from trunk lately, but i believe since (k)ubuntu 0810, comes with Qt4 and KDE4 libs, rather that talking gstreamer native, phonon could be a good thing.

But then maybe is say that coz i dislike having to deal with g_objects and gtk event loop.  Phonon is a breath of fresh air -  API wise - but practicality still remains to be seen.

Ohh, and I've remembered a blog entry i saw a while ago.  Qt/KDE widget in 3D space - with our own theming we can make nice consistent buttons, grids, textedit etc.. exciting!

http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/12/02/widgets-enter-the-third-dimension-wolfenqt/ also http://www.vtk.org/pipermail/vtkusers/2008-October/097529.html and for a pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ariyahidayat/2621182494/


Best tools for the job i say.

Sam

Hi,

I've also been looking at the same thing.  I've moved from XBMC to LMCE recently, and its cetainly one think I miss  TV Shows and Music Videos autotagging. 

Downloaded the source of XBMC and Entertainer (another MediaCenter) and am looking a stripping some of the tagging code and adapting it to LMCE.  Maybe I'll be able to come up with a script that we can hook into UpdateMedia so we can get auto tagging done. 

My experience with XBMC tagging is very positive, 90% it gets it right - and also passes .nfo files, which is also nice. We could go a step further and even support libmusicbrainz too for audio tagging - the sky is the limit. 

Lastly been able to manage this from the onscreen orbiter would also be a bonus, as my wife would not be interested  bringing the WebAdmin - as it is, it intimidates her, and she's not interest in going in there when ever she upload her media from her laptop to the NAS drive.

Will post my further progress on this thread.. I'm really excited about this.. and if someone has worked on this before i'd love to chat in IRC and put our heads together to get the best possible experience in LMCE

Was just thinking this over - for those of us who acquire lots of video media, such as TV shows via, say, torrents - tagging manually all the time can be a pain (esp compared with ripping DVDs and mp3 which usually get tagged automatically)

How about if you could mark certain folders under videos as auto-tagging folders. Such that you might have a "movies" folder, that automatically tags any media placed in there as of Movie type, same for Music Videos, etc. Even subfolders that might tag Genres, perhaps Years, or Show, etc. True, it wouldn't be practical to set Titles and so on in this way. But the advantage would be that many people already have a folder structure like this, and merely by directing their BT client to download to the correct folder, you could set 3 or 4 of the general attribute types automatically.

This would assist in increasing the usage of the various other Sort modes other than Filename. I know its almost heresy here, but I have to confess that I do use Filename mode very regularly for this reason! The system could be generic so that there isn't a defined folder structure, you can simply mark the folder you want to have the autotagging feature and then list the attributes you want to set, and their values (perhaps this could be extended at some point to include some level of macro/regular exp)

This could either be integrated into UpdateMedia or be a separate function completely that accesses the database directly to stamp the attributes. The only things I can think of that would need to be addressed would be whether it overrides existing tags, or whether you would have to manually go to the admin console and tell it to override; whether it would look at existing files in a folder just configured for autotagging or only new files....

best regards,

Sam

I have to agree with you jondecker, i'm also talking from ignorance, but i beleive you make a really good point.  If i look at what XBMC has done - they've just pegged minimum requirements as "OpenGL V2 support required" on the hardware side, and are effectively supporting all major GPU, Intel, ATI & NVidia.  They also do a-lot of similar effects to what we do in LMCE, overlaying UIs on background media - be it pictures or video.

You also mention Gnome, whats the plan there - are you planing to move away from KDE?
Is there some sort of roadmap for 0810?

Just curious,

br

Sam

Speaking out of ignorance, but wouldn't it make more sense to do all rendering (video and UI) to a GL surface? I don't see the advantage of the XVideo surface and compositing.
Look at video games for example, you rarely see problems associated with alpha blending and framerate or vsync. The only problems are usually associated with the z-buffer, which does not apply in this case.
Sure, it may take some extra processor overhead, but UI2 by design is for higher end systems.
Can't it be as simple as copying the XVideo buffer to an OpenGL buffer, doing your alpha blending, then bringing the entire result back to XVideo for rendering?

IMO, compositing xv and GL together is an ugly practice, requiring specialized driver support. Blending multiple surfaces under only OpenGL however would be much better, and would eliminate the need for driver support for composite extensions and such (it should run on any decent OpenGL supported gfx card). It would likely also be a good start to getting things to run on Gnome as well. I guess the trick would be benchmarking the performance hit of such an approach.

edit:
heres a small related article
http://lurkertech.com/lg/ogl.video.html

I'm excited about this thread, ATI & Intel has some good offerings and theres many small form-factor boxes on sales that use Via Chrome, Intel and ATI chipsets.

If only i knew how to help :-(

br

Sam

this is a follow up from http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=5797.30

I got an ATI based board for exact that reason. We also got a intel based TEO-X unit for testing. It is not that the core devs really liked the "go nvidia" recommendation. Tschak already gave pointers to the code sections in question. It would help if somebody could isolate the needed GL stuff and write a small reproducer with our needed functions.

A summary from danielk:
The X.org extensions the UI2 uses above the usual suspects are:
  XDamage
  XComposite
  XRender

The UI is rendered to an OpenGL surface and the video is rendered to
an XVideo surface, so both need to be supported with XComposite. Also,
OpenGL must support the GLX_RGBA_BIT render type; basically it needs
to support RGB buffers with an alpha channel. We don't need any alpha
for the XVideo since it's always on the bottom of the stack and has
full opacity.

XVideo must support buffers of at least 1920x1088. The 8 at the end
of 1088 is not a mistake; at least one driver for intel chips supported
"1920x1080" video frames, but this meant it couldn't play ATSC
1920x1080, video since the actual size of the video buffer is 1920x1088
due to the MPEG2 16x16 block size. XVideo also needs to respect the
dimensions of the video frame to use and the output frame in
XvShmPutImage, including negative x & y output position values (for
when the user zooms into the video) and support showing only a portion
of the input buffer (This is used, for instance, for bob deinterlacing
when the top half of the buffer is used for the even fields and the
bottom half of the buffer is used for the odd fields.) It doesn't matter
if only I420_PLANAR or YV12_PLANAR is supported for the video buffers,
but if both are advertised in the driver they should both work without
funky colors (Some ATI drivers pretend to support I420, but actually
always display the buffer as a YV12 buffer, so the U & V planes are
reversed when an application selects I420_PLANAR).

We currently use xcompmgr for the compositing, but I'm open to changing
this. What I really want, which we don't have with nvidia, is foolproof
V-Sync when using XComposite. Currently, if we turn try to enable
a video player's use of OpenGL V-Sync we actually lose V-Sync when
XComposite is in use. If we enable global V-Sync in the nVidia driver
we get a little judder when it works, and sometimes it doesn't work
at all.

best regards,
Hari

HDMI audio is fine on my msi media live.


I believe you will still need an amp to drive speakers from the media live.



Tim

Tim,

You are right, what i was trying to do was hook up my Media Live in the Den to some Computer Speakers i had from my gaming machine a while ago, they support 5.1, and i have some RCA->Mini-Jack adaptors to connect them.

The main reason i'm keen to get try it out is i have some AC3 audio in some of my MKV files, and these dont seem to play audio when using the analog A/V out, I though theres probably an on-board Dobly Decorder that can decode the signal and out put on the 7.1 audio panel on the back of the MSI Live..

Its not a train smash, but would be nice when using the MSI Live in other rooms where you don't necessarily want an AV Receiver but would like some decent Surround audio, like the bedroom.  I've already ordered a Yamaha AVR for my living room... can't wait to hook that up, hope serial control wont give me hell - still struggling with IR control from my Samsung TV

regards,

Sam

Hi,

I've also recently bought my first MSI Media Live MD,  I don't have an AV Reciever yet and would like to get DTS 7.1 Audio out of the device. Is that possible? Most of the threads i've read people often send optical digital audio to their AVR to do the work.  I just want to use built in 7.1 Audio thats built in to the device for now.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

P.S.  I am getting audio out of the device at the moment using the RCA output (A/V Out) and using DVI/VGA out, I saw a thread about HDMI Audio, and it seemed to state that it was unstable at best, and we should stay away for now..

Best wishes for 2009!

Sam

Hi,

Was wondering if anyone had tested the above mentioned device with LMCE?  Am keen to know of cost effective solutions - esp for the European market.  At the moment I only know if the Seluxit viaSENS Home Controller - which is NOT very cheap.

best regards,

Sam

Hi,

We've just received a pre-production 'golden sample of the Tricklestar usb Stick. We'll update everyone on our experiences next week.

Andrew

Still watching this thread - await your feedback Andrew.. how did you find the Trickestar?

best regards,

Sam

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone has made any progress with MediaTomb or Fuppes with regards to transcoding.  I'm really keen to see if i can stream content to the Nokia N810/N800

thanks,

Sam

What exactly are you trying to transcode? I have very good sucess using the mythTV upnp server as well as fuppes (and thats with a busted config!) with no issues on my ps3. there is pretty good documentation on how to setup custom device profiles as well in their docs. I recommend checking them out. As far as mediatomb, i checked it out but the lack of 360 support makes it a non-starter imo.

If you post what your issues are, i will be more than happy to try and help you figure it out.

From what ive seen in my experience and as tschak has pointed out to me, upnp is pretty sloppy so those making devices make it quite difficult to know exactly what  it specific requirements are. if you check out the fuppes config.

This http://fuppes.ulrich-voelkel.de/wiki/index.php?title=Device_specific_settings will take you to the project relevant docs.

You can see the specific vs general settings

also, dont miss http://fuppes.ulrich-voelkel.de/wiki/index.php?title=Device_specific_settings#video_transcoding. This version, im assuming is compiled with transcoding support because i didnt need to re-compile. I dont remember if i needed to set the flag, but you can check to see if its enabled by

-going to the webadmin
-from top navigation
    advanced ----> configuration -------> upnp server
-choose 'status' and a list of the configured options will come up.

this list will show you options enabled for filetypes for 'general' devices as well as specific ones. You can check there to see what the options are, and with the links above and knowledge of what your device can handle, create a custom profile if needed.


And check back, maybe if we get more people using the upnp stuff we can compile the config files into one larger one.

BTW vfolder.cfg is a whole other bag of worms i have yet to figure out. im still in the transcoding phase

Thank you for your post.  Looked at the Device specific settings and will be playing around with it to try put together a device template for the Nokia N810/N800 - thats were my interest was, most of my videos in my library won't play well on the N810 and would like them transcoded for better playback performance. 

Will post how it all pans out - looking good ATM

br,

Sam

Thanks guys, that Z-Wave USB Dongle looks like exactly what i want. (http://shop.micasaverde.com)  Its a pitty i still have to go purchase more hardware before i can test/pair my Z-Wave equipment.  Tried various Windows software but no luck yet.

best regards,

Sam

Yes, thank you so much for the wiki update, sounding good!


Sam,

I have added a new section to the ZWave page on the Wiki that takes you through step-by-step using the Tricklestar remote and SIS mode to include new devices into your ZWave network. This will give you a better idea of how this works in practice. See here;

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Z-Wave#Manual_Setup_using_SIS_Mode_with_the_Tricklestar_Remote

If your not worried about SIS mode and therefore not being able to use the newer ZWave devices Hari mention earlier then I agree with Thom about the Micasaverde USB stick being a good choice.

Enjoy!

All the best

Andrew

thx for the wiki add

Thanks guys, that Z-Wave USB Dongle looks like exactly what i want. (http://shop.micasaverde.com)  Its a pitty i still have to go purchase more hardware before i can test/pair my Z-Wave equipment.  Tried various Windows software but no luck yet.

best regards,

Sam