[Freevo-users] Re: mini itx cases, and a right turn

[Paul Shan]

I'll throw in my two cents on this topic.  I probably approached this 
backwards, but I started with hardware and went looking for software to 
run it.  I bought a PCChips 578 motherboard because it was cheap ($55) 
and supported a Pentium III 866 I had lying around doing nothing.  As 
for a case, I bought an Acer H340 black case ($42) because it looks like 
it belongs in an entertainment system.  For all the parts I spend about 
$175 so far, not including a floppy, CDROM (eventually to change to a 
DVD player), 128Meg PC133 RAM, 20Gig WD drive and PIII 866 that I 
salvaged from a dead PC.  The only problem I had was connecting the 
front USB ports to the motherboard.  Have you ever smelled burning 
insulation?  yech.  The pinouts were the same according to both manuals, 
but the front USB ports are toast...literally.

Anyway, for a capture card I bought an ATI TV Wonder (Not VE, $45?) 
because it is low profile, and has coax, composite and S-video in, and I 
bought a cheap MX440 video card (from Palit, $48) that was low profile 
and included a VGA port, composite and S-video out.  I installed all the 
included software just to make sure it all works...it was all Windows 
software.  It all works, and the video quality was very good, as well as 
the recording quality.  But Windows had to go, so I installed RedHat 
(after a long detour with Mandrqake 9.1 first...XMLTV library dependency 
headaches).  I got everything installed and working (Freevo 1.3.2, 
XMLTV, mplayer) together.  However, the video quality is 
terrible...everything is orange.  I'm pretty sure the saturation is too 
high, but I don't know how to change it in mplayer such that it 
remembers the settings when I shutdown and restart.  It also skips 
frames and the audio is out of sync.

Also, while TV capture worked very well in Windows on this machine, the 
capture is horrible with mencoder.  It drops many frames and the 
playback is blocky (too much compression?).  Doesn't the encoder on the 
TV Wonder already do the processing that mencoder is trying to do?  For 
now I have left my PVR alone until I feel like fighting with it again. 

Well, this is more than two cents, but that's my story and I'm sticking 
to it.  Thanks for listening/help and for having such a useful project!

-- Paul
P.S.:  Know where I can get an IR module for this mobo that can fill the 
hole left by the fried USB ports?



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