Arch Linux

billy

Member

From: Slovenia

Registered: 2006-09-13

Posts: 164

home theatre PC problem

I'm planning to build a PC for my living room to play videos, music and tv. I have an old PC: Duron 1300, 128 MB sd-ram and Geforce 2 MX400 which i could use. I installed Freevo on it and it all works fine but i haven't tested it with a tv card because I don't know which card to buy. This PC is absolutely not powerful enough (well i think so ) to encode video in real-time. So now i have two choices what to buy:
- Pinnacle PCTV 310i card with hardware encoding (100€), or
- a brand new PC: Intel Celeron 420 1600Mhz (or AMD Sempron 3400+), some cheap mainboard, 512 DDR2 ram, Radeon 2400HD and Pinnacle PCTV 50i with no hardware video encoding (near 200€)

I think the second option would be better, because it could play HD video and run more intensive games. But i'm not sure if that is the right decision :S. Which one do you think would be better? Would the second PC be powerful enough to encode video in real-time (MPEG-2)? If I go with the second PC which processor would be better and would I have any difficulties with Arch64? Does anyone have any experience with pinnacle tv cards? They are listed here: http://www.linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.ph … 3x_devices , but there isn't any description how they work.

Thank you for all your help

P.S.: When I'm done with configuring this PC maybe i'll write some wiki page about Freevo, because i think it has simpler menus (no config menus where kids can screw up something ) for people with no knowledge about computers.

Last edited by billy (2007-09-20 17:19:01)

rayjgu3

Member

From: Chicago IL usa

Registered: 2004-07-04

Posts: 695

Re: home theatre PC problem

is hdtv something you have with your cable/dish people?
if not (which i dont have)
i recommend pvr150
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products … vr150.html
"WinTV-PVRs' hardware MPEG encoder does all the work so your PC continues to run at full speed!"
i have pvr500 which has 2 pvr150's
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products … 00mce.html
"WinTV-PVR-500 MCE contains two complete TV tuners, each with their own hardware MPEG encoder!"
i have recorded a few things they came out fine
either machine you use i say will work fine
mine is stand alone(no network) arch64 myth box ( i didnt have too many spare parts so i bought new box)

if hdtv is something thats important for you then i dont have any experience with that to offer

billy

Member

From: Slovenia

Registered: 2006-09-13

Posts: 164

Re: home theatre PC problem

well we don't have HD tv not even cable . But if I buy a new box, why not buy it so it plays HD. Radeon HD2400 is one of the cheapest cards.
I thought of buying a hauppauge PVR card but I can't find no one who would sell them in Slovenia .

billy

Member

From: Slovenia

Registered: 2006-09-13

Posts: 164

Re: home theatre PC problem

I bought Pinnacle pctv analog pro pco (110i) and video and sound work great Also i can encode to mpeg4 in real-time.

But now i have another problem with lirc. It doesn't work . I run

lircd -H pinsys -d /dev/ttySx

with x being all availabile serial devices but I get no response from irw.
When i do 'modprobe lirc_serial' i get:

lirc_dev: IR Remote Control driver registered, at major 61 
lirc_serial: port 03f8 already in use
lirc_serial: use 'setserial /dev/ttySX uart none'
lirc_serial: or compile the serial port driver as module and
lirc_serial: make sure this module is loaded first

and if i do this again i get:

kobject_add failed for lirc_serial.0 with -EEXIST, don't try to register things with the same name in the same directory.
 [<c0234105>] kobject_shadow_add+0x115/0x1a0
 [<c0237a45>] vsnprintf+0x2d5/0x620
 [<c0297036>] device_add+0xb6/0x500
 [<c029ad19>] platform_device_add+0xf9/0x150
 [<c8fe4032>] init_module+0x32/0x2ac [lirc_serial]
 [<c014dcd6>] sys_init_module+0x126/0x1990
 [<c8cacced>] reiserfs_dirty_inode+0x9d/0xa0 [reiserfs]
 [<c016bb03>] vma_link+0xb3/0x100
 [<c016c8ed>] do_mmap_pgoff+0x52d/0x7a0
 [<c010433e>] sysenter_past_esp+0x6b/0xa1
 =======================

I think this problem could be connected to FS6224 bug.

How can i enable my remote?
Thanks for all the help

Last edited by billy (2007-09-25 12:11:50)

hybrid

Member

Registered: 2007-02-05

Posts: 261

Re: home theatre PC problem

Well, the problem is that the kernel's serial port driver is compiled into Arch's standard kernel. The easiest would be if you did what your computer tells you to do: a 'setserial /dev/ttySX uart none' (you gotta substitute X of course again, I betcha it's a 0 :>) to release the serial port and then you load the module and everything according to plan. Should work then.
Instead of releasing the port manually (which of course needs to be done after every boot, so you might want to put that into your initscripts) you can recompile the kernel with the driver only being compiled as a module.
I would go (am going on my system) with setserial.
Congratz, I'm sure you'll soon have everything set up to your liking. :>

billy

Member

From: Slovenia

Registered: 2006-09-13

Posts: 164

Re: home theatre PC problem

I tried to release the serial port but it didn't work . But why does an IR receiver that connected directly to tv card map to serial port? Or the guys that wrote how-to's that were about pinnacle remote were all using IR receiver connected to serial port ? Should i use some other device file?

Last edited by billy (2007-09-27 17:23:41)