Hi,
I am currently setting up a freevo box on a MSI Hermes 651P. I would like to share my
experiences, problems and solutions I found out. Perhaps someone is interested...
Regards,
Thorsten
1. The idea
===========
Last year, I began to digtize some old videotapes. I also began to use my computer as
a video recorder and I also collected some shows in divx format. I did this with
Windows XP on a relatively loud box...
I found out that Windows did not let me do exactly the things I wanted to, so I
installed a linux partition. I decided for Debian Woody. I muddled around with mythTV
a little bit, but it never really worked as desired (sorry, Ben...). Eventually I came
across freevo 1.3.4. That looked really good. I learned a little bit about python
which also turned out to be really cool and very readable.
What I liked most with freevo was that it uses specialized software for each task. So
I could (e.g.) test mplayer alone without invoking the whole thing first.
But my box was very loud and very big. So I started to think about building a
specialized box for all the freevo tasks. I decided for a MSI Hermes 651P. In the
magazin C't, they wrote that this box had a very good TV-Out and I like how the box
looks.
2. The hardware
===============
Ok, that's what I put into...
1. CPU Intel Pentium 4, 2,66 GHz
2. 512MB Kingston Value Ram (ECC)
3. Harddisk Seagate 160 GB, 7200 RPM
4. DVD LiteOn
All the components are relatively silent, except the DVD.
I have also bought a chep keyboard. Currently, I am using an old 15'' screen, not the
TV
3. Installing the system
========================
After putting everything in the box, I installed a basic debian woody installation. I
created a special 50G partition with reiserFS for the multimedia data. As kernel, I
started with 2.4.18 and switched to 2.4.20 a little bit later. Everything went very
fast and smooth in this stage.
I also set up the network, so I could use my old box (aka loudbox) as an internet
gateway for the new box (aka silentbox). I muddled around with the kernel on loudbox,
so I had a hard time seeting up this, including ifconfig, iptables etc.
4. Installing freevo
====================
Because I wanted to do the installation via apt, I have changed the sources.list file
to point to a debian distribution site (ftp.de.debian.org) and to the sites mentioned
in the installation doc of freevo. I then realized that marillat.free.fr does not
contain the packages any more. I had to switch to hpisi.nerim.net.
Most of the parts of freevo (and mplayer) need packages at least from debian testing,
so I changed apt.conf to look after testing first. My apt.conf looks like this:
APT::Default-Release "testing";
APT::Cache-Limit "12582912";
The second line is needed because of some problems when updating from more than one
source (on my machine...)
Then I did
apt-get update
to get all the package information.
Afterwards,
apt-get -s install freevo
to simulate the installation of freevo.
This lead (among others) to some problem with package KDE. I want to use freevo from
console in frame buffer mode directly and I am not really inetrested in X-based things
on this box, so I did
apt-get remove kde
to get rid of that problem.
(This should also work when you are actually using kde. The package is only a virtual
one without files in it.)
In the end, I did apt-get install freevo a few times. If have only an ISDN connection
and especially the things from hpisi.nerim.net needed a few tries. In the end, all the
freevo files were installed.
5. Starting freevo the first time, getting to work the video output
===================================================================
After typing
freevo
freevo did not really start. It seemed that freevo tried to run with a resolution of
800x600, which the generic fbdev driver did not really like. So I set the resolution
in /etc/freevo/freevo.conf to 640x480 just to make it work. Then, freevo really
started.
But it seems that there were not that much colors...
This was the time when I realized that I had to watch out for a better driver for the
graphics adapter of my box. I googled around a little bit, but I was not able to find
really good things about my graphics chip. This was last Saturday, late in the
evening...
The next morning, my head was a little bit clearer and I searched after "SIS 651"
instead of "SIS651" and found the page of Thomas Winischhofer
(http://www.winischhofer.net/linuxsisvga.shtml). So I learned, that the graphics part
of SiS 651 is compatible to the graphics adapter SiS 315 series, which is supported in
the 2.4.20 kernel sources. A few kernel compiler runs later, I've got the little
penguin in the corner of the screen while starting up...
I could also switch the video mode using fbset. I inserted the line
append="video=sisfb:mode:800x600x32,mem:12288,rate=60"
This seems to be the best mode for the rather old fashioned crt I am using at the
moment. Freevo looks really good with that and I believe that I will also get
something similar out of my TV.
When starting freevo, there is one weird thing happening. I believe that this has
something to do with the way how pygame interacts with the frame buffer driver
(directly or indirectly, I don't know that). Every time, freevo starts, it seems like
all the possible video modes are probed. Then one mode is chosen, but this is not the
one that I like. So I put the command
fbset 800x600-60 -depth 32
into OSD_SDL_EXEC_AFTER_STARTUP into local_conf.py
After shutting down freevo, my system found itself in a video mode with rate 85 and
depth 8. (I really do not know why...) So I put the same fbset command into
OSD_SDL_EXEC_AFTER_SHUTDOWN
Perhaps someone knows about that. Perhaps, this is something special to the sisfb
driver. Even if I only change consoles by <Alt>-Fn, I get a debug message about some
video mode.
6. Freevo and authorizations - crash, crash, crash...
=====================================================
It seems that freevo is supposed to run from the user root. Everytime, I tried
something different, I went into some crashes or even the whole system seemed to be
dead. (In fact I could rlogin from another box, but I could not get the consoles back
responding...)
I chmod'd /dev/fb0, /dev/mixer and /dev/psaux (there's the mouse...). A few things are
working now. But it seems that there is missing something. Is there a way to really
run freevo with a user other than root?
It also seems that freevo does not like it at all when I try to enter a directory
(e.g. from the "Play music" menu) and there are files which freevo is not allowed to
read. There is no message about authorization but a crash message. In the end: I am
running freevo only as root.
7. Giving mplayer something to eat...
=====================================
Ok, everything looked nice. I then copied a few JPGs, MP3s and AVIs to he new box. (I
have learned that you do not need nfs for just copying files over the network. The
command scp works good for that purpose.)
The JPGs just looked ok from the beginning - no problem there.
The AVIs were a little bit small. I have activated the first occurence of
MPLAYER_SOFTWARE_SCALER in /etc/freevo/local_conf.py to get a full screen display.
(Perhaps this could also be done without CPU, but I do not know yet.)
Then I tested the MP3s which did not work. I had to activate the OSS support for i810
in my kernel to get this to work. Now, it really sounds good.
One thing is open at this time (apart TV, DVD, CDDA, XMLTV, Games support etc...): If
I insert freevo in /etc/rc2.d ( ln -s /etc/init.d/freevo /etc/rc2.d/S99freevo ) to
start it automatically at system start, freevo really starts, but mplayer is not
working. After shutting down freevo, logging in as root and starting freevo again,
everything works...
8. A (hopefully not so) long way to go
======================================
This is how far I came last weekend. I hope that somebody thinks that at least a
little part of my mailing is useful... If this should be not the case than perhaps
someone can answer my questions. (Thanks...)
Regards,
Thorsten
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