MediaBox Blog

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.

As some of you may already know (for those who don't, check out Part 1 and Part 2 of my HOWTO on making a home-brew IR receiver for LIRC), I had made changes to the audio-alsa driver in LIRC to support sound cards that do not support capturing audio samples in stereo.

You will be glad to know that, as of 3nd June 2008 you can have this support directly in LIRC's CVS copy. To use the stereo feature you need to specify which channel to read the samples from, left or right. Here is an example on how to get irrecord listening to the right channel.

irrecord -d hw@44100,r file.config

If you want audio-alsa to capture samples from the left channel then specify 'l' instead of 'r'

What do we ask of a great media centre PC? Well the purpose if this blog is to find out just that.

My mind has been in gear now for some time to setup the perfect media centre/home theatre PC. I have been doing lots of research over the last 12 months on various pieces of software and hardware that I will be using. Now that I have decided to take the plunge I thought it would be good idea to document the good, the bad, and the ugly. What better way than using a blog!

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