Building a Media PC and want to use Linux

Founder_film

Founder_film

Founder_film

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I have been thinking of building a pc to plug directly into my TV and to play media content (mainly video). I want to use Linux as its free and I don't like windows.

I like the look of Xubuntu or LinuxMint. Which one would you guys suggest considering I am a noob?

I want the pc to be able to play HD content (.mkv files) and also video files I ripped from my DVDs to play on my iPod. Can these distros do this? Or is it a case of getting the right media application?

That leads me onto is there any Media player/library applications that are similar to iTunes? I like the way you can store all your movies in iTunes and I would like to do that same in Linux.

I really want to try Linux properly and the fact I can make a media pc for around £200 and not pay £400 for a Mac Mini is really appealing :)
 
Maybe you should look at MythBuntu or LinuxMCE, these have almost everything as part of the distro plus nice pretty (ish) user interfaces that are usable when sat on the sofa
 
Yeah I had looked at MythTV etc but not been impressed. Though I like the look of Mythbuntu. However would it let me still use regular applications like Bit Torrents etc?
 
I think it was the "look" of it, being a person that has used Macs for years now I am into things looking pretty (shallow I know). However the latest Mythbuntu looks very nice.

Just looks at the minimum requirements for it though and it has a TV tuner card in the list. Do you have to have a tuner card to run mythTV? I only want it for my own movie files.

Also will it play the .mkv and .mp4 I already have?
 
You don't need a tuner. If you lack one you, obviously can't use its PVR functions but you don't care. I use my Myth system to play .mkv and .mp4 stuff all the time with the internal player. it can also be told to use Xine, Mplayer, or VLC to do the video decoding.

If you don't like the look of it you can always change the skin. Mythbuntu ships with more than a dozen and many more are available on the interwebs.
 
Thanks for the info. Seems like this is the best solution for what I want. Now I just have to decide on which components to get. Is nvidia still the way to go for graphics card for linux?
 
It's all pretty dire, actually. Both nVidia and ATi have pretty good 3D drivers now, but you don't need 3D performance. Intel probably has the best driver support, but they don't have any special hardware for HD video acceleration, specifically H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC). nVidia's PureVideo and ATi's AVIVO are both not supported with the proprietary drivers and neither has been doing much to change that. ATi released some hardware specs a few months back, but that's about it. AFAIK the specs they released were not sufficient to get AVIVO working.

If you have a CPU that's powerful enough not to need XvMC to help then it doesn't matter either way.
 
XvMC? Not sure what that is.

I am looking to get the following spec:

Core 2 Duo E2180 2.0GHz
2 Gig RAM
Nvidia 8400GS 256Mb GPU
250Gb hard drive (more storage to be added later)

You think that would do for what I am planning?
 
That's just about the same spec as my current mediacentre, it plays back HD material just fine, as well as all the rest of the things.

It'll be fine for use with linux, xp or vista. If you're getting a TV tuner make sure it's compatible on all platforms.
 
XvMC is X video Motion Compensation. No, I don't know why they capitalize it that way. Essentially it's the Linux framework for hardware accelerated video decoding.

The Windows equivalent is called DxVA.
 
XvMC wont help you with HD content regardless, it is solely used for MPEG-2 decoding. The chip you've got will handle MPEG-2 content, even HD, just about fine. You might need to turn it on for 1080p/24 MPEG-2, but who has any of that..

There is no hardware acceleration for H264 at all. There are motions afoot to make a framework, but its slow going. Last time I checked, it was a couple of guys from intel, and that was about it. http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/vaapi

That PC should be fine for 720p 'scene' mkvs, but wont play back 1080p releases. It certainly wont be able to cope with high bitrate MPEG 4 AVC from BBC HD, picked up using a dvb-s card (I know, I tried last weekend, virtually same CPU :) )

MythTV is a bit of a dog tbh. The main functions of it - TV, scheduling TV shows to record, watching recorded TV shows - is pretty good. The rest is pretty crap tbh. The video player, to playback files off your hd, reindexes your entire media collection each time it starts up. If you have a sizeable collection, or lots of small files in one directory, it takes an age to do this. I'm actually writing a replacement for the frontend of mythtv atm, it just doesn't quite do it for me.

BTW, the capitalisation is in the name. XvMC is Xvideo Motion Compensation, not X video Motion Compensation. Xvideo is a rendering extension of X11.
 
Sounds like your gripes are with the MythVideo plugin, not with the MythTV frontend itself. It seems like changing a few lines of code in the plugin to tell it not to automatically re-index would be a heck of a lot more time efficient than rewriting from scratch. IIRC versions prior to 0.19 did not automatically re-index the video library/gallery but users requested that this be changed so that newly added videos appeared in the gallery without any futzing around.

As for the internal player itself, I think it's fantastic. It seems to do better with H.264 than VLC, especially when skipping around to a particular spot in the video. Even if it wasn't up to snuff, Myth makes it easy to use other video players, specifically VLC, MPlayer, and Xine.
 
Nah, I've got plenty of gripes with the rest of the system - I get to wade through enough badly written C++ at work thanks! The internal player is nice, it is uses ffmpeg under the covers. It's funny it does x264 better than vlc, as they both use ffmpeg, maybe it is better configured than vlc.

My CPU couldnt keep up when playing using the internal player, so I spent a lot of time finding a combination that would, and I finally settled on mplayer, which worked just fine as long as the video output mode was set to opengl2 (-vo opengl2). I think the internal player uses the equivalent of -vo xv.

Lets face it, at the end of the day, if your using an open source media player with open source codecs, you're going to be using ffmpeg, libav{codec,format}, liba52, libdvdread, libdvdcss etc regardless of what actual player you use :)

I'm enjoying writing this though - haven't had my own project for years. I guess I've really just got a case of NIH, and know I could make something better. Plus I'm bored :)
 
Try "elisa" it looks cool and doesn't call every plug in myth-this myth-that and it doesn't have font end back end stuff to configure its simple. It easy to install on Ubuntu should be the same Xubuntu I would think and the company backing it Fluendo make codecs and I believe they are working on HD.
 
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