MediaBox Blog

I have been in the process of implementing Asterisk into my home entertainment system so that caller id can be seen when watching TV, the ability to answer incoming calls and even make outgoing calls via MediaBox.

But before doing all that I had never come across asterisk in my various undertakings in the past so I thought it would be a good idea to get used to how it works and how to setup a VoIP system. Since this was something that had been on the cards for a while at work, I volunteered to do it.

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Introduction


HTPC, or "Home Theatre Personal Computer", describes a personal computer that is, as the name suggests, integrated with a home theatre, or entertainment, system. Essentially, an HTPC can allow access to video content, TV, music and the Internet from a single, centralised location and replace your CD player, DVD player, Freeview box, etc. with a single device. You can buy an HTPC, ready built, from a manufacturer or retailer, or, if you have sufficient expertise, you can build one yourself, from scratch. Do bear in mind, however, that an HTPC is unlike a typical desktop PC in many ways and a typical desktop PC lacks the hardware and software necessary for it to operate successfully as an HTPC.


HTPC Requirements


Basically, a typical HTPC requires a decent processor, such as Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, with a clock speed of 2.4GHz, or faster, 1GB or 2GB of RAM and a hard drive, preferably SATA ("Serial Advanced Technology Attachment"), with a capacity of at least 500 GB. Above and beyond that, however, it also requires a video card and sound card capable of playing back video and audio of the required quality and a capture card, such as a TV tuner card.


Connectivity is also an important issue. A typical desktop PC is designed to direct video and audio output to a monitor and speakers, via VGA, or DVI, for example, but an HTPC is designed to integrate directly with home entertainment components, such as HDTV and digital surround sound systems.. As such, an HTPC typically features the latest, all-digital, HDMI ("High Definition Multimedia Interface") which is capable of transmitting uncompressed digital video and audio, including up to 8 channel digital surround sound, in a single cable.


A TV tuner card is a card that is installed internally in an HTPC, or connected externally, via a USB port and allows television signals to be received. There are several different types of TV tuner cards available, depending on the type of television programming that you want to watch. Analogue TV tuner cards, for example, support connection to an RF aerial for terrestrial programming, while digital TV tuner cards allow Freeview channels to be received additionally and satellite TV tuner cards do away with a set-top box altogether, allowing a viewing card to be inserted into the TV tuner card, itself.


Aside from TV, an HTPC can, of course, function as a Blu-ray and/or divx dvd player, DVR and media server.

For those of you out there with PureVideo enabled Nvidia video cards, you will be happy to know that MythTV now has direct support for the new VDPAU API supplied with the Nvidia binary drivers. Well what does this mean you may ask. Well a great deal, you should now be able to watch 1080p HD content with ease since most of the decoding work will be done by the GPU.

Lets all just hope that AMD will supply details of their AMDXvBA library shortly so the same thing can be achieved for us AMD users out there.

If you read my previous article, MediaBox has switched to the radeonhd driver you would realise that MediaBox is now running using the radeonhd driver instead of the AMD Catalyst fglrx driver. In this article I will explain how to get the radeonhd master source code, apply the HDMI Audio patch from Christian König, build and install the driver and finally edit the xorg.conf to enable HDMI audio. Before I start though I would like to give a big thanks to Christian for his hard work in creating the patch for the open source community.

Edit:

Since writing this article, the HDMI audio patch from Christian has now been merged to master. I have now edited the article so that there is no need to apply any patches.

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As some of you may already know AMD/ATI are releasing documentation for their GPU's to the public. What this means to you and me is that the open source community can now write a fully functional open source driver. We no longer have to rely on the buggy Catalyst drivers, even though AMD have gone to great lengths to improve the fglrx driver in past months.

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