A new LinuxMCE user

[wombiroller]

Hi All,

I finally took the plunge and installed LinuxMCE 0710 RC1. I am still at the early stages of setup - but thought I would let everyone know how I go with my hardware.

Core/Hybrid setup is:

• Core 2 Duo 8200
• Asus P5k PRO Motherboard (P35 chipset) (http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=534&l4=0&model=1921&modelmenu=1)
• Audio Realtek ALC883 8 Channel onboard (currently using analog stereo out)
• Nvidia PCIe 7300 GPU (using VGA)
• 2GB Corsair PC6400 DDR RAM
• 500 GB Seagate SATAII 32MB
• Zalman 460W noiseless PSU
• 2 x Ethernet (Gigabit Lan onboard + a PCI 10/100)
• PCI Avermedia 777 DVB-T
• Logitech Dinovo Bluetooth keyboard

Other stuff laying about(more to come as I go):

• Dlink DNS 323 NAS (with 500GB single drive)
• Samsung 46" M8 LCD
• WRT54GS Router (DHCP disabled)
• Standard Windows XP shares
• PS3

Install went well, no major problems. Very logical and well explained process IMO. Settings:

- UI2 with transparency @ 1280 x 1024 works a charm (1080p hopefully this weekend)
- MythTV setup / DVB-T success, however the quality appear to be lacking. Some channels have quite a few artifacts and others such as Ten HD (I'm in Victoria, Australia BTW) are unwatchable (through ABC HDTV seems to be OK?)
- Ice TV guide (XMLTV) works fine as you would expect
- NAS and Windows share initially auto-detected (but then i screwed the NAS up - see below**)
- Other devices in the network appear to have Internet access via the Core (had to switch the interfaces - murphy's law)

The only real issue I had was with the resolution. I ended up having to go with 1280x1024 @ 60 hz as although the TV supports 1080p and both 1080p and 720p were selectable in the GUI - both (@60 and at @50hz) came through as "resolution not supported" on the Samsung M8 LCD. Not sure if this is driver issues or something else. Will try and work it out this weekend.

_{**I completely deleted the NAS from devices after it was auto-detected (wanted to change it's shared directories etc and thought I'd just get it to auto-detect again) and now I can't get it back! The NAS still seems to get an IP from the core (192.168.0.253 - I can browse to the web admin page) and I have tried adding the device manually using template 1769 (think this is the correct one) but it doesn't appear to work. Is there anyway to force it to be auto detected again as this doesn't seem to be happening regardless of what I do...?}

Anyway - plenty more to do and research. Other stuff on the todo list are (any suggestions/recommendations are more than welcome!);

• Get a Gyro or Fiire remote
• Get a VOIP provide in Aus (and a VOIP device)
• Purchase/Setup a USB-IRT device (any suggestions here are welcome!)
• Install Thom's fantastic MAME plugin
• See if I can get the Dinovo keyboard special keys to work

Thanks to the community for a great platform. Much appreciated!

Rgds,
WR.

[sambuca]

Hi, and welcome

Just a couple of suggestions/hints:
* MythTV quality - there is a setting somewhere (recording group?) in the mythtv frontend that allows you to select the quality setting for LiveTV etc. Maybe this will help.

* VoIP - I came over this forum post dealing with setting up a Gigaset handset using asterisk http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/927308.html, that guy is also in Australia.
I just purchased a Gigaset (S675IP) that I am hoping to set up with LMCE/Asterisk when I get the time.

* Extra keyboard keys - I suppose the procedure for setting up extra mouse buttons could work for this case too (haven't tried it myself, so don't shoot me  ). It is the wiki : http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Use_Additional_Mouse_Buttons

regards,
sambuca

[wombiroller]

Thanks Sambuca 

* MythTV quality - there is a setting somewhere (recording group?) in the mythtv frontend that allows you to select the quality setting for LiveTV etc. Maybe this will help.

I had a play with the options in MythTV but alas don't seem to be having any luck yet. Changing the deinterlace options and preferred MPEG decoder seemed to change the types of problems a little (especially XvMC decoder which kills everything  ) but nothing appears to make it better. Thanks for the suggestion though.

VoIP - I came over this forum post dealing with setting up a Gigaset handset using asterisk http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/927308.html, that guy is also in Australia.
I just purchased a Gigaset (S675IP) that I am hoping to set up with LMCE/Asterisk when I get the time.

I'll take a look at that VoIP phone - looks very nice although not having a home phone line these days I wonder if I would end up paying for functionality I wouldn't use (the fact its a POTS device as well)?

* Extra keyboard keys - I suppose the procedure for setting up extra mouse buttons could work for this case too (haven't tried it myself, so don't shoot me  Wink ). It is the wiki : http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Use_Additional_Mouse_Buttons

Thanks!

Currently trying to work out how to easily edit my video media's attributes when the stuff is stored on the NAS (after getting it working thanks to this thread - http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=1426.0)

The media browser in the admin page doesn't appear to allow this if the videos are on the NAS (unless I'm missing something) - don't suppose anyone knows about this?

Also

Cheers,
WR