Linux Media Jukebox on the Cheap 225
tsetem writes "Over on ExtremeTech, they have a write-up on building your own Linux Media Jukebox for a little over $500 and a bit of elbow-grease. This is probably the PC we were hoping that the Lindows Media PC would've been." This particular project uses Freevo which has matured significantly
since I last looked at it.
Small but more than just an MP3 player (Score:5, Interesting)
Features:
1) tablet form with about a10" screen with a foldable or removable stand
2) support solid state media (smart cards, etc) along with a replaceable/ugradable hard drive for (somewhat limited) data storage.
3) WiFi capability (to network to a media server in your home) and wired network capability.
4) runs from battery or wall wart
5) robust. don't want to break the display the first time I accidentally knock it off my desk.
6) affordable!
So, any entrepeneurs out there with a load of ready to design and tool up to build this thing for me?
Curious: Anyone running this on a fanless Epia? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a current (and very happy) Tivo user, but I wouldn't mind the ability to add MP3 playback and so I've been keeping half an eye on Freevo. The idea would be to put a fanless Epia-M into a hi-fi style case, and use it purely through a remote of some kind. Just like a Tivo in fact, but with the ability to do music too.
Cheers,
Ian
HDTV (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Freevo, MythTV (Score:4, Interesting)
MythTV has more features, and it works slightly better, BUT.. It's a pain to config and setup, and don't even get me started on the hell of making LIRC work with MythTV, on Redhat.
Freevo is nice only because it puts everything together, in a slightly simpler package than MythTv. But it lacks features.. Hrm.
Recently my roommate and I each built PVR boxes, and in the end, I heard a lot less swearing, and cussing from him, because he went with a Windows (XP) solution. He's using the Snapstream 3.0 Beta.. Pretty much does everything that Freevo/Myth does.. except you don't go insane when installing it. But yeah, if you can't get beyond having to run windows, then try MythTv or Freevo.
But how quiet is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I want from a media PC (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, it's a media PC. I want to put it in the front room with my TV.
2. Near silent operation.
See above. No use being in my front room if it sounds like a jet engine.
3. Ability to play, rip and stream (to other PCs) a variety of music file formats now and effortlessly accept more codecs in the future.
Right now my collection is in MP3 format. When I have time, I will probably rip to Ogg from scratch. In two years time, who knows what new super-duper format will be king?
4. Ability to play DVDs (of all regions) effortlessly.
Region encoding is ridiculous. If I bought it then I want to be able to play it. It shouldn't matter if I live in London, New York or Tokyo. 'Nuff said.
5. Ability to watch and record TV, PVR-style.
Hey, it's not that difficult.
6. Ability to do more than one of the above at once.
If I want to stream music to elsewhere in the house, I still want to be able to watch a DVD without it skipping frames. It's not that much to ask.
7. Ability to burn CD-RWs and/or DVDs
It would be really nice if this DVD+/DVD- format war would just resolve itself. Multi-format players, like the ones from Sony, are nice but we shouldn't have to pay a premium just to avoid the risk of buying a turkey.
8. Automatic update option.
Some people like to have complete control of their box but the mass market demands simplicity. The Average Joe doesn't want something he's going to have to tinker with every two weeks. Let the AJs have their automatic updates and let the power users do what they want too.
I'm sure I've left something off this list but these are the bare minimums that I'd look for in my ideal media PC.
Noise / fanless epia (Score:5, Interesting)
I've investigated the mini-itx boards, and it appears that they might have just enough oomph to play back video, maybe to encode video with low compression, but not do both at the same time.
Some of the mini-itx boards have onboard hardware MPEG decoders, which would help a lot, but I'm fairly sure there is no Linux support for these, and I know Freevo doesn't support any hardware MPEG decoders yet.
One day, one day.
Adding an PCI MPEG encoder/decoder uses up your one PCI slot...
Re:Freevo, MythTV (Score:2, Interesting)
windows is very likely easier, but from the geek standpoint, I think the linux way allows so much more tinkering ability - so it is whether you want something that just works - or something that you can fool around with and have fun.
I'm personally a stats junkie, so I'll likely go the linux route (or perhaps both - the windows one for "everyone" to use in my apt, and the linux one for me to tinker with)
Re:Freevo, MythTV (Score:4, Interesting)
I've actually been looking at another option (Score:4, Interesting)
I figure I can hook this bad boy up to my powerhouse machine and just send it all wireless.
The only thing I'm concerned about is sound quality. I've already got a dvd player so I don't need that functionality. I just want a way to play my divx files and ogg/mp3s on the main system.
I've done some testing, converting divx to vcd but I always end up with unsynched sound. I also figure that keeping things in divx would be much better than spending the time converting them to vcd and having to change disks halfway through.
Re:Curious: Anyone running this on a fanless Epia? (Score:4, Interesting)
DVDs played, but were skippy and annoying. High-quality DivX was even worse.
It has so much trouble playing back these streams, I cant imagine the struggles it would have trying to encode them in real time (with a capture card in its free PCI slot).
All in all, I thought it would be neat for a little kiosk-type workstation or something, but didnt cut it as an entertainment device. So back it went.
There are newer, faster, better models. But, I ended up going for Shuttle's FV25 flex-atx boards with Celeron 1.0a's (tualitin core, 256k cache). It's almost as small, has everything onboard (just add 40$ celery CPU and ram), and was much more powerful.
It has onboard S4 savage video with shared ram (it aint high end by any means, but is more capable than people give it credit for - my kids play Dragons Lair 3D and other recent titles on it all the time). DVD/DivX/MP3/etc playback is A1.
It's not fanless, of course, but the way they mounted in the cases I used (refurbed and repainted "Barbie PC" flex atx cases), air is drawn in the bottom, over a fanless CPU/sink (I had to hunt for a sink that was not too big, the intel stock sink wouldnt fit) and straight out the back, so one 80mm fan pinned down to 7 volts keeps the board nice and cool, and you cant hear it.
Shuttle also has FlexATX boards for P4 and Athlon, if you wanted some real power for gaming. You find 'em primarily in their spacewalker barebones kits, but you can buy them seperately if you look around online.
Waiting for drivers.. (Score:3, Interesting)
But personally Ill be waiting a little while longer before i make my own little PVR box, im waiting for the IvyTV project [sourceforge.net]'s drivers to mature some more. And then use a Hauppauge WinTV 350 [hauppauge.com] as the base for my box, this will give me real time hardware mpeg-2 encoding/decoding. The IvyTV team are doing great, in record time they have a partly working driver and a plug in for mythtv. So i think its safe to say that within a years time well see a Video4Linux2 compliant driver with hardware encoding/decoding support from them.
So why do i want to encode to mpeg-2 anyways? I want to use mpeg-2 as the primary format on the box and divx as a "backup" format. Also with hardware mpeg-2 encoding, it should be possible for me to include a DVD burner and make it possible for me to record directly to a video dvd. Which would be really neat =)
Geez, I'm getting tired of these articles (Score:1, Interesting)
The bottom line on a do-it-yourself media center is that it has to offer some combination of better performance, lower price, more features, and greater flexibility and capability than commercial products. If it doesn't, why not buy something that just works when you bring it home from Best Buy?
Plus with the above requirements it must be in a form factor visually compatible with current audio/visual components, must be silent, and must be remote controlled via some standard-looking remote control unit and TV monitor on-screen status display with an excellent GUI. In short, it must be a media center, not a tricked-up PC. If a wireless keyboard/mouse is required for simplied support of features such as entering/changing file names when ripping MP3s that's OK, but I want to be able to ignore it for day-to-day operation.
Oh, and HDTV. If I'm going to bother to spend the time and money to build one, it needs to be ready for the future.
Why do this at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why bother to reinvent on Linux what exists elsewhere commercially.
Yeah, we all want free, but why waste personal time on reinventing, shameless copying even.
How about people do something different, innovative even instead of trying to make Linux do what XP (or fill in your favorite blank) already does?
Ok, I don't watch TV much either, but hey, I have a life.
Re:Why do this at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
I came to a similar conclusion when I built my media PC. I installed Linux, and started trying to get all the bits of software I wanted working. After a couple of days I gave up and popped an old copy of Windows I had lying around on it.
Next I installed the copy of WinDVD 5.1 channel DTS edition that came with the sound card, and the video capture software that came with the ATi AIW card. Placing shortcuts to these on the desktop at a very large icon and text size made it easy to use with just the remote (which came with the Abit AU10 sound card, and plugged into the keyboard port).
No doubt I will now be modded down for suggesting that Linux is not the solution to every possible problem.
How about people do something different, innovative even instead of trying to make Linux do what XP (or fill in your favorite blank) already does?
This seems to be a common problem with Open Source Software. There is a certain amount of innovation, but in general it is eclipsed by the vast numbers of 'let's be an inferior copy of Windows / Mac / Other' projects.
Footnote: After about a year I came to the conclusion that I was only really using it as a DVD player, and replaced it with a hardware DVD player.
Re:Freevo, MythTV (Score:2, Interesting)
I compiled Mythtv, and it was horrible on my 800mhz Duron with 512mbRAM. I already have like four to five computers on in the house at any one time (mine, the wife's, the two kids, and the firewall) I don't really want a backend db server for a frontend media server. I like the one quiet piece does it all. I have thought about adding the mysql db to the firewall box, but hate doing that.
I actually found the XMLTV portion to be the easiest and most well documented. Now... there was bug in the freevo scripts that needed some help after that was working. And then there were the daylight savings issues, which shouldn't have been an issue, and all the skins' bugs and errors. And hey, I had as much trouble with Nvidia's driver and tv output.
I believe they are JOBOKHPAMAA (just o' bunch o' kid hackers playing at making an app) but there is some GREAT potential. If you don't count my frustrated time, I am getting my money's worth.
Free Software versus ReplayTV (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a free software guy, myself, but wouldn't be adverse to buying a ReplayTV or Tivo or whatever proprietary system if it had the one killer feature I need. Your goals are a little different than mine; you want 500 hours of recording time; I want a VCD factory. I want to just tell my machine this fall, "Make me a season set of Smallville," and then in May 2004 play disk swap while my system burns the entirety of Smallville season 3 for me.
I don't think proprietary solutions will ever support that, which is why I'm waiting for the free solutions to catch up to the point I can modify them to do what I want.