[A-Swiss]

Hi there

After a long period working on Win//8 based HTPC - und a little try with RaspBMC - i want to setup my new ASRock Mini with a Linux based XBMC.

PC has this setup:

AMD E2-1800 APU
AMD A68M Chipset
Integrated AMD Radeon™ HD7340M Graphics
Supports Bitstream / audio pass through (Dolby® TrueHD and DTS HD Master audio)
7.1 CH HD Audio
WiFi 802.11n + BT v4.0 support

What should work:
- passthrough HDMI
- use of the Logittech Harmony
- Connection to NAS over LAN (no WiFi setup planned).

Due to the fact, that i'm not used to Linux OS at all, what would you recommend me?

thanks
A-Swiss

[wsnipex]

OpenElec, Xbmcbuntu or http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174854

[A-Swiss]

OpenElec, Xbmcbuntu

Thanks
Regarding Performance - are there any differences between OpenELEC and XBMCbuntu?
Regarding Version 13.2 --> do both have to be updated manually or is it just XBMCbuntu?

[wsnipex]

performance wise, there won't be a really noticeable difference. Xbmcbuntu needs an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade for 13.2, OE does not.

[A-Swiss]

Cool - Thanks a lot... will go for OE

[oldtvwatcher]

Before you rush off to install OpenELEC you should understand the difference in philosophies between the distributions.

OpenELEC locks you into their ecosystem. You cannot even do many common Linux tasks (such as install the Midnight Commander file manager) in OpenELEC. They basically assume that you want an "appliance" computer that runs XBMC only and NOTHING else. Which is okay if that's what you want, and maybe great if you want absolutely nothing to do with Linux, but you do have other options.

XBMCbuntu is based on Ubuntu and therefore you do have access to all the standard Ubuntu packages. So if you decide you want to run something else in addition to XBMC, at least it's possible.

Or you can create a full Linux PC with XBMC installed as a program. You can start with Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and I would choose a Long Term Support (LTS) version if one is available so you don't have to reinstall the operating system every six months. Then you simply go to the XBMC page and install XBMC as a program. This is how I have always done it but that is because I also have a Mythbuntu server for my over-the-air stuff so I also have the MythTV frontend installed in addition to XBMC (and I know that XBMC can act as a MythTV client but to me the picture quality isn't quite as sharp in XBMC, and also sometimes XBMC will only play stereo audio in a program that has true 5.1 audio, whereas MythTV plays it as 5.1 (and it's not that XBMC won't play 5.1, it's just as if it doesn't detect it correctly in certain cases).

So if you want absolutely nothing to do with Linux and the only interest it holds for you is that it's not Windows, and the only program you ever want to run is XBMC with OpenELEC extensions, then go with OpenELEC. Otherwise I'd consider other options. I tried OpenELEC once on a Raspberry Pi and hated it after about ten minutes (particularly when I found out I couldn't install Midnight Commander, which is a must-have program for me), but to each his own.

[fritsch]

Just in case for your midnight commander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJisy6pvCGs

[A-Swiss]

I was trying OpenElec first, and after your post - I gave XBMCbuntu a chance...
So - I agree with you - since most of the add-ons where somehow not available within OE - I decided to stay on XBMCbuntu...
I was able to install and configure it within 1 hour! GREAT! Even the Upgrade to 13.2 with Putty was done in some minutes, thanks to the great wiki!

Thanks a lot folks - my mum will get her HTPC end of the week!

[oldtvwatcher]

Just in case for your midnight commander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJisy6pvCGs

That's interesting, don't recall if they had anything like that in the Raspberry Pi version but then it's been over a year since I tried it there. Wound up settling on RasPBX for the Raspberry Pi, and on a full HTPC system I installed Ubuntu and have not looked back. I do wish XBMC had not changed the way they support audio under Ubuntu, because it "just worked" under Frodo but since Gotham came along it's a bit hit-or-miss whether the audio will be full 5.1 or dropped down to stereo. We think it has something to do with the way certain channels encode their stream (such as whether they use H.264 or not) but I am not that much into Linux to be able to figure it out. But until that is straightened out I still want the option to use the MythTV frontend.

Beyond that, we have the rather unusual situation of having both a Mythbuntu backend for over-the-air (terrestrial) television, which we access using the MythTV frontend, and a TVHeadEnd backend that we use for free-to-air satellite channels. My understanding is that although XBMC has plugins for both, only one PVR plugin can be enabled at a time. Am I wrong about that?

[fritsch]

Yeah - if you would start to read the documentation, you would know that you can have the old behaviour back: http://kodi.wiki/view/PulseAudio

[wsnipex]

there is no problem with audio, given that you configure it correctly for your hardware.

[A-Swiss]

I was not able to check the HTPC on my AVR (planned tomorrow)...
I was reading through your posts, and discovered that there might be a limitation on the HDMI passthrough, such was not passing DTS-HD MA, HR or Dolby TrueHD, correct?

Has anyone checked or tried the solution in this article?
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/...-over-hdmi

I know, that for a Distribution, most of the cases must be covered by 1 common installation, but I'm curious, if the limitation do still exist.
I do often setup HTPC's for friends, and when i build PC's based on XBMCbuntu, i must be aware where the limitations are.
thanks for all your support.

[oldtvwatcher]

Yeah - if you would start to read the documentation, you would know that you can have the old behaviour back: http://kodi.wiki/view/PulseAudio

That is a lot to digest - as I said, in Frodo and prior it "just worked", by which I mean I did have to find the correct output setting, but that was a simple process of finding the correct option in a dropdown, and if you got the wrong selection it just didn't work at all, so it was pretty easy to find the correct one through trial and error.

Looking at that page, I get the feeling that neither option is applicable to my setup. For one thing, on my system (Acer Revo running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) in the Output Device tab it only shows me the option to use Digital Output (S/PDIF) which is what I want, other than that it looks like the top half of the first example but without the individual channel volume controls in the bottom half of that screenshot. Also in my case EAC3 is not checked because IIRC when I checked that I got no sound at all on certain videos. On the configuration tab, I have selected "Digital Stereo (IEC958) Output + Analog Stereo Input" - at the time I set it up, someone had told me that was the correct choice to send the audio via S/PDIF to my receiver, and that regardless of the word "stereo" it would actually send 5.1, which it does with some types of programs but not others.

All the options in the Configuration tab that mention 5.1 specifically seem to be for HDMI output. Since my receiver is old enough that it does not pass HDMI (it's from pre-HDTV days), that's not going to work for me. It just puzzles me why this had to get so complicated in Gotham when it worked fine in Frodo, and still works fine if I use the MythTV frontend (which worked even before I installed the PulseAudio Volume Control shown in the documentation, which by the way I had read when I was initially setting up XBMC, it was the only way I could get audio to work at all in XBMC).

Anyway we have drifted off topic here and it was just a general comment - I wish setting up true surround sound that "just works" was as easy as it was under Frodo. That is all.

[fritsch]

- EAC3 is not supported on SPDIF devices. It needs HDMI.
- Multichannel output (pcm mode) needs HDMI, too. SPDIF is limited to 2 pcm channels, but can do AC3 and DTS as those are virtual formats with encoded data.
- Some settings are only chown _if_ the devices in PA sense are configured correctly (e.g. ac3, dts enabled with pavucontrol)
- When you use Pulse and have EAC3 option there, you did not configure pavucontrol correctly for your SPDIF device.


Basically, we use the soundserver that you have installed, you are using, your desktop is using and your complete desktop applications is using. If you want Frodo behaviour, just start xbmc with:

Code:

AE_SINK=ALSA xbmc

and done - no pulseaudio will ever going on your nerves.

[wsnipex]

I was not able to check the HTPC on my AVR (planned tomorrow)...
I was reading through your posts, and discovered that there might be a limitation on the HDMI passthrough, such was not passing DTS-HD MA, HR or Dolby TrueHD, correct?

Has anyone checked or tried the solution in this article?
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/...-over-hdmi

I know, that for a Distribution, most of the cases must be covered by 1 common installation, but I'm curious, if the limitation do still exist.
I do often setup HTPC's for friends, and when i build PC's based on XBMCbuntu, i must be aware where the limitations are.
thanks for all your support.

those limitations have been lifted for almost all hardware that supports HD audio passthrough in more recent drivers and kernels using alsa.
Pulse audio is a different matter and still does not support HD audio passthrough. Thats also the reason pulse is not used in OE and Xbmcbuntu.