HTPC configuration series
Posted 10-08-2010 at 04:09 PM by serafean
In this little blog series I'll describe my process of configuring my new HTPC.
hardware :
hardware-wise; a surprising discovery was that the slim DVD drive has a special power connector for which I had to buy an adapter (some sort of SATA/power combo)
The hardware worked out of the box, the only part that had to be searched for was the LCD. The imon remote does however use a driver I'm not sure is in the vanilla kernel yet, but is in zen-kernel
LCD : the lcdproc imon driver works great. All the icons work too (more details in a later post)
After a night left to compile a gentoo base system (make.conf & co configuration done), the first impressions are here:
Audio output : analog works out of the box, 5.1 sound to the amp has to be passed through (mplayer option -afm=hwac3). To get stereo output on the amp, mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.1 (0.3 for hdmi) is necessary, analog output gets disabled though.
Video : nvidia binary
drivers work like charm. hardware accelerated 1080p decoding using vdpau, and opengl acceleration work good.
is required to make it work. .mplayer/config file creation recommended on this 
Thats it for first impressions, next up X configuration for separate X screens.
hardware :
- M/B : Zotac ION-ITX F E(PDF brochure)
- Remote/LCD Display : iMon Ultrabay(discontidued)
- CD/DVD reader/burner : Sony optiarc SATA slot-in.
- Case : APlus cupid 1
- HDMI connected TV, running a media center
- DVI/D-Sub connected LCD screen on which a full fledged KDE desktop always ready for quick internet acces (and to serve a connected scanner)
- Sound output simultaneously to an amp (via optical) and to the tv (jack connector for now, HDMI maybe later); possibly 2.0 to 5.1 upmixing
- Apache, CUPS, FTP, Samba servers.
- wifi access point (the zotac has an atheros chip, good outlook there)
hardware-wise; a surprising discovery was that the slim DVD drive has a special power connector for which I had to buy an adapter (some sort of SATA/power combo)
The hardware worked out of the box, the only part that had to be searched for was the LCD. The imon remote does however use a driver I'm not sure is in the vanilla kernel yet, but is in zen-kernel
LCD : the lcdproc imon driver works great. All the icons work too (more details in a later post)
After a night left to compile a gentoo base system (make.conf & co configuration done), the first impressions are here:
Audio output : analog works out of the box, 5.1 sound to the amp has to be passed through (mplayer option -afm=hwac3). To get stereo output on the amp, mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.1 (0.3 for hdmi) is necessary, analog output gets disabled though.
Video : nvidia binary
drivers work like charm. hardware accelerated 1080p decoding using vdpau, and opengl acceleration work good. Code:
mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdapu,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau -ao alsa:device=hw=0.1 -afm=hwac3
Thats it for first impressions, next up X configuration for separate X screens.
Total Comments 0
