1st Experience with Linux MCE - Need help with media support.

[RockSteady]

Hello everyone.

I have been doing a lot of research about setting my 1st HTPC with the following main goals.

• Archive my CD collection to FLAC files and tag them accordingly
• Archive my DVD collection to folder rips (Video_TS) and tag them accordingly
• Setup a NAS or Server to hold all my digital media
• Setup a HTPC or / and Extender to access it throughout the house

Disclaimer: Until a week ago, I never touched a linux distro besides ubuntu live cd.


I spent a lot of times reading guides and previewing different solution online (Windows MCE/MythMedia/LinuxMCE/GB-PVR) and I gotta say LinuxMCE tickled the gadget lover in me.

I then grabbed an old p4 machine to play around and also tried a virtual pc installation (sooo painfull because of the 16bits video). Both gave me unsatisfactory results (ati card on the p4 and 16 bits video on VPC). Now I realize after many hours researching solutions for the VPC and the ATI card, that these are common issues but coming from a Windows world, where everything is truly plug and play, I jumped into this project very naively. I strongly encourage you to have something along there lines on the main page: "Will only work with supported hardware"

I decided to take a old HDD and put it in my main pc (nvidia card on this one), unplug the existing one and start from scratch. I got to setup everything with my vga output first. It worked! The main interface is nice, the options screens are a little "rough around the edges", but hey, It's FREE. I put a DVD in there that started to play and went to rip it. I couldn't find any keyboard/mouse input guide so I had to press and guess to find that the F-keys were used to drive many menus (main UI/volume/media control).

I then proceeded to setup the box with my component output. However no option for 1080i was present. I read you could change it in the xorg.conf but detailed instructions for a newby to linux were nowhere to be found.

I finally plugged in my External HD with about 20 flac albums, and nothing was shown in the media. The only way I can select songs is to browse by filename.

So here are my newbies questions (need detailed answer please, im trying to learn this):

How do I enable 1080i output and setup the overscan settings like the wizard did for 480p?
Why is LinuxMCE not reading the Flac metadata from my files?

I will glady post detailed specs / sample if needed.

Thanks for any help provided.

[1audio]

First- you need to rerun the video wizard to change the settings properly. There are instructions on the WiKi. The 1080i should be available when you get the component video up.
Second, The FLAC issue has been resolved but won't be in the wild until 710 (very soon now). It has required some changes in the media management to get it working right.

[RockSteady]

Thank you for the answer, however the 1080i option doesn't show in the options on the A/V wizard, hence my question. I believe it was disabled on purpose for that beta build from reading the forums (see this: http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=2625.0). The thing is, I don't even know what a modeline is and how to set it up right. I would love a detailed (step by step) explanation on how to do this.

Here are the details:

LinuxMCE 0710 BETA4 DVD install
Nvidia 8800 GTS hooked up to screen with DVI and VGA (dual input LCD) and to TV via component cables.
TV supports 480p and 1080i input (no 720p).
A/V wizard shows 480p and 720p only in component options. however I can use the "key in method" on the 1st screen to switch to 1080i (3 and 9), but then I have to revert it to 480p since no 1080i option is available on screen 2.

[1audio]

You can manually edit xorg.conf. Here is some insight http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/x-config.html but its not to be done casually (think editing a Windows Registry).
The best way I have found is to open a putty session into the system and cut and paste the modeline desired from the myth modeline database. So Google, Putty, Myth Modeline and look at the article above to get started. I also use Winscp a lot. I'm not that attached to Linux only.

[geoffrey]

My experience with manually setting the modeline to 1080i was that it is possible, but it caused the UI to run very slowly.  Annoyingly slowly.  Using 720p was not noticeably worse as far as picture quality but the UI functioned normally....so I just stuck with it.

so i guess the only question is does your monitor not handle 720p at all or just not natively?  If it can, I would just stick with it cause 1080i was a pain...