Freevo Setup
This is some random information on my freevo setup. First here is a quick outline.
I have a EPIA M10000 board setup as a Home Theater PC. The machine is setup to boot over the network and loads its filesystem via NFS from a server. The system boots directly into XFree86 where it then loads the freevo software which manages how things get played. I use xine for video purposes and mplayer for mp3/flac.
Video:
Using the xfree86 version distributed with debian sid.
Currently using the unichrome driver which has been working very well.
You can find the newest version on the Unichrome Website on sf.net
Here is my current XF86Config-4 file. (this is on a debian system running X version 4.3.0.dfsg.1-6 at the time of this writing)
Audio:
Using the ALSA audio drivers. They support the SPDIF output on the m10000 boards quite well which allows for full DTS and Dolby Digital Surround sound.
To have xine output dolby digital audio to your reciever you need to set the audio.speaker_arrangement: setting in the ~/.xine/config file to audio.speaker_arrangement:Pass Through By default this option is set to output two channel audio. Of course you will need to be hooked up to your reciever using the digital output (the rca video output doubles a spdif output via a jumper on the mainboard).
Control:
I control freevo by using an IRman that is hooked to up the serial port and controled by lirc.
Links:
Freevo
Epia Kernel Patches
epiawiki.org
epia howto
bootsplash.de
bootsplash.org (offical site)
Linux HTPC Howto
Via Arena Linux Forum
Unichrome:
I've started work on getting the whole unichrome setup working properly in hope to fix some choppy video I have on very high quality sources.
From my understanding you need to do the following:
- First recompile X with unichrome support. This seems to have been inserted into the Xorg csv a week or two ago and so I'm using that. More information on how to get/compile from the XOrg CvsPage.
- Second you need a kernel with drm support. I haven't attempted this part yet, but more infromation on drm can be found at dri.sourceforge.net, and downloaded there as well via csv.
- I needed to install the via driver from the unichrome site as the Xorg driver didn't seem to be the one I needed. I followed the instructions from unichrome site that explained everything fairly well. I didn't replace the XvMC library however.
- In order to use the unichrome drivers once your all up and running you'll need xine-libs that support this. From what I've read these should be available in the latest csv as well now.
In order to compile you need a new version of automake. I had to apt-get install automake1.9 in order to sucessfully run the autogen.sh script. I also had some issues with it not finding the Xv driver. I fixed this by creating a symbolic link to libXv.so called libXv.a in the /usr/X11R6/lib/ directory.
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xine login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xine co xine-lib
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xine co xine-ui
Packages I needed to install in order to compile X:
libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libxft-dev libexpat1-dev
Last Updated: 2004/10/28 11:29am