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.
Categories: Hardware, Audio, IR Receiver, TV, Video
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.
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.
For those of you who are having HDMI audio issues with the RS780, you will be happy to know that AMD have released the Catalyst 8.9 drivers which has a fix HDMI audio (among many others).
You can find the x86 version here http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeon.html
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