Monday, August 13, 2007

LinuxMCE

I recently spotted a news item on AutomatedHome about the new release of LinuxMCE (http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/Software/LinuxMCE-0704-Released.html). Basically, the project aims to be a Linux replacement for Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition... with extra bells and whistles.

I have been using Windows MCE for almost 2 years and I have found it great as a PVR using my two GDI Black Gold digital tuner cards. I have found that it is a bit limited though... particularly if you want to intergrate it with other systems.

One of the biggest of these drawbacks is extending it to other rooms - this requires a Microsoft Media Extender and even then you can't watch live TV in the secondary room. With LinuxMCE, thin client devices boot from the 'core' machine and media can follow you around the home... this can be seen to good affect in the video on the LinuxMCE site.

Anyway... I checked compatibility for my existing hardware and all seemed well... I downloaded the quickstart ISO (a DVD featuring Kubuntu and LinuxMCE - which is itself a collection of several other projects) which took an age due to its size!

I proceeded to install the distro on my PC and all went well until the initial hardware setup wizard began. No output on the screen! I tried every combination of the number keys to get a resolution that my DVI-connected TFT would accept to no avail. I then tried the second DVI port on my graphics card and it worked straight away! That was a serious schoolboy error!!!

I then followed the rest of the setup wizard (which includes a number of video with a lovely woman telling you what to do) but at no point were my TV cards detected :-(

By reading the dmesg output it seems that my card type isn't automatically detected. This has been my major stumbling block as there seems to be nothing on the net about my particular card in Linux. By editting the modprobe.conf I have successfully got Linux to recognise one of my cards but that is as far as I can get.

I cannot seem to make the card play any further... either through the LinuxMCE wizard or MythTV. I'm not going to give up now that I have got this far and I'm hoping to have an influx of people telling what to do. An update will be forthcoming when I crack it ;-)