Since living in a flat, I’m not allowed to use a satellite-dish
which terminates my dream of the wonderufl DVB-S. We got cable with
almost 40 channels, most of them home-shopping-crap… but at least
Munich is DVB-T broadcasting about 24 channels since May this year.
DVB-C brings only 8 free digital channels on cable, all the other
stuff is commercial and really expensive.

So the obvious way to go was, using DVB-T together with analogue
channels from the cable and mix all that well with the usual
mediacenter stuff (movie player,photos,music,dvd,text).

I studied all of the latest set-top boxes, and commercial
media-centers, but all of them lack one or more big features:
Internet-TV-channels and custom onscreen infos/ticker
Finally you would end up with more single media boxes than a
home-cinema-rack has AV-connectors.

Building my own PC media center seems the only way to achieve my
“everybody’s?” ultimate mediacenter goal.

The big problem now is, that it’s almost impossible to find a
software which can handle DVB-T and analogue channels within one
channellist. That means you always have to change the device/tuner
and then select the channel, instead of simply channeljump through
analogue and digital broadcasts. Further to pass analogue channels
the same way as a DVB receiver does to a mpeg2 decoder, analogue
channels will need to be encoded to mpeg2 first to feed a unique
output-decoder… grrrrrrrrr.
I think most people will not understand the above as long as they
haven’t tried by themselves.

OK, I skipped the analogue part for the moment, and start using
DVB-T.

Yesterday I bought the Terratec Cinergy 1400 DVB-T Card, which is
now officially supported in Kernel 2.6.13. (There’re also
mixed-mode cards available, but without mpeg2 encoder, which means
it’s just two cards in one, nothing more.)

Already a long time ago, I bought myself a Mini-ITX PC, to have a
compact, powersaving and silent computer for the living room.
Since I’m a gentoo linux enthusiast, I compiled everything from
scratch on that slow=powersaving machine.

Compiling the new kernel for an Epia M10000 Ezra board, was quite a
challenge, although I had absolutely no problems in the past, but I
found out “vesafb-tng” doesn’t work anymore in 2.6.13, “vesafb-old”
does only work if it’s not compiled as a module. And compiling
takes quite a time on this 900MHz hardware. For a first try I
skipped patching the sources with older 2.6.7 epia patches, which
I’ll need later to get hardware-mpeg-acceleration CLE266,
framebuffer and XVideo motion compensation XvMC running.

After compiling 2.6.13 for the third time, this time successful, I
gave up and did go to sleep.
Not sure if I’ll pick up there tomorrow, or simple use my already
prepared debian-dvd’s.

It’s hard to reduce power consumption, if you have to let the
computer running the whole night to get some stuff compiled.
Where’s the powersaving here ? A fast machine can at least save
power when it’s unused.

…to be continued…