Ibn's blog

A month or two ago, our cheap DVB-T to PAL converter died a tragic death. The most tragic thing about it was that we were pretty indifferent about it. It wasn't very good, and we don't watch TV very much. After a while though, we started looking for a replacement. Pretty quickly we decided that timeshift and recording are essential features, so we started looking around for a replacement with those features.

The replacements were not very cheap (by our standards), ca 2500SEK (ca $300US) - and that was when the geek was awakened from its oh so short slumber. I spent a day or two (or five) browsing for parts - and came up with a supperior solution for the same money. After a (suspiciously short) period of convincing, Linda agreed that we ought to buy the parts and build our own HMC (home media center).

This is what I ordered:
INTEL D945GCLF2 LITTLE FALLS ATOM 330 MINI-ITX
HITACHI DESKSTAR P7K500 500GB 7200RPM SATA/300 16MB
DELTACO TV-CARD FOR DVB-T USB-ADAPTER INCL REMOTE
Compucase 8K01BS - Black 100W
Kingston DDR2 2048MB 667MHz CL5

Note what's absent:
Screen (we're using the TV).
DVD/CD reader (we already have a combined DVD/VCR).
Wireless network (we're using ethernet - more cables, yay!)
Remote control (well, the TV-card has built in support for a cheap remote)
Cables (I had an ethernet cable, but had to get s-video cable and s-video to scart converter)

All the parts came together as they should, and the system was built a week ago. That's when I realized I had to get an OS on there too. Browsing around, I found some stuff about how to boot the d945gclf2 from usb, and also flashing the bios(in Swedish, but has good links). I formatted my USB-key with Free-DOS, and copied Intels BIOS flashing utils on there, and reflashed the BIOS.

Then I reformated the USB key and copied Mythbuntu onto it (after googling for ways to turn a live-CD into a live-USB-key). Booting Mythbuntu, I realized that maybe I had a problem - the screen was rolling. I connected a VGA-monitor and rebooted, and that worked fine. Still rolling TV picture though. So I tried every single available resolution, but nothing worked.

Next stop, Mythdora, but same result there. What is this? My first guess is that it was a PAL<->NTSC problem. I started googling - and that's when I realized i really had a problem. Everywhere I looked, everyone had the same problem as I. It seems this Intel board doesn't have driver support for the S-Video port. Finally I found this bug at fd.o - where an Intel employee claims to have fixed the issue. Only problem is that the fix is only available in git.

Long story short, I saw two choices: 1) Go back to Mythbuntu alpha (make a comlete reinstall again!) and then install just the git intel driver, and maybe a new kernel, or 2) install everything xorg from git on Mythdora (since it's built on F10 with an older xorg). Since I run Gentoo on the desktop and laptop - I found choice #2 the more compelling one. This guide helped a lot, I used the script by the end (though I had to add xineramaproto to make it work).

That's where I'm currently at. The picture at the start of this post is with the TV and HMC on. Let's just say that it's not very illuminating. This project is currently not experiencing any hazard of becoming finished. Even if I do get TV-out working, there is the slight problem that the TV-card does not have any Linux driver...

Here's more illumination.