The Ultimate Mediacenter - Part I

I'm already looking a long time for the ultimate media and entertainment center out of the box, but yet nothin' serious came up my horizon so far.

Since living in a flat, I'm not allowed to use a satellite-dish which terminates my dream of the wonderufl DVB-S. We got cable with almost 40 channels, most of them home-shopping-crap... but at least Munich is DVB-T broadcasting about 24 channels since May this year. DVB-C brings only 8 free digital channels on cable, all the other stuff is commercial and really expensive.

So the obvious way to go was, using DVB-T together with analogue channels from the cable and mix all that well with the usual mediacenter stuff (movie player,photos,music,dvd,text).

I studied all of the latest set-top boxes, and commercial media-centers, but all of them lack one or more big features: Internet-TV-channels and custom onscreen infos/ticker
Finally you would end up with more single media boxes than a home-cinema-rack has AV-connectors.

Building my own PC media center seems the only way to achieve my "everybody's?" ultimate mediacenter goal.

The big problem now is, that it's almost impossible to find a software which can handle DVB-T and analogue channels within one channellist. That means you always have to change the device/tuner and then select the channel, instead of simply channeljump through analogue and digital broadcasts. Further to pass analogue channels the same way as a DVB receiver does to a mpeg2 decoder, analogue channels will need to be encoded to mpeg2 first to feed a unique output-decoder... grrrrrrrrr.
I think most people will not understand the above as long as they haven't tried by themselves.

OK, I skipped the analogue part for the moment, and start using DVB-T.

Yesterday I bought the Terratec Cinergy 1400 DVB-T Card, which is now officially supported in Kernel 2.6.13. (There're also mixed-mode cards available, but without mpeg2 encoder, which means it's just two cards in one, nothing more.)

Already a long time ago, I bought myself a Mini-ITX PC, to have a compact, powersaving and silent computer for the living room.
Since I'm a gentoo linux enthusiast, I compiled everything from scratch on that slow=powersaving machine.

Compiling the new kernel for an Epia M10000 Ezra board, was quite a challenge, although I had absolutely no problems in the past, but I found out "vesafb-tng" doesn't work anymore in 2.6.13, "vesafb-old" does only work if it's not compiled as a module. And compiling takes quite a time on this 900MHz hardware. For a first try I skipped patching the sources with older 2.6.7 epia patches, which I'll need later to get hardware-mpeg-acceleration CLE266, framebuffer and XVideo motion compensation XvMC running.

After compiling 2.6.13 for the third time, this time successful, I gave up and did go to sleep.
Not sure if I'll pick up there tomorrow, or simple use my already prepared debian-dvd's.

It's hard to reduce power consumption, if you have to let the computer running the whole night to get some stuff compiled. Where's the powersaving here ? A fast machine can at least save power when it's unused.

...to be continued...