Hello

Just got a load of old P3 766, 128MB 40GB HDD Machines and just wondered if Knoppmyth is suitable as a Media Centre type of OS for these machines, Ideally we need a simple Consumer electronics system with the minium of fuss!!

Is it possible to quicky and easily installl Knoppmyth and how easy is it to copy a Movie DVD to HDD to play later? Will it import Pictures and Audio from pen drives etc etc??

My very first "proof of concept" machine was build from spare parts and ran R5E50 - R5F1. I used a P3 800? I think it had 256 ram and 2 6gig drives in an LVM setup. For capture I used a Plextor M402U (hardware divx encding) and it could play it back fine as long as there wasn't any background activity.

Menu navigation was delayed at times even with all the eye candy turned off.

I don't recall ripping any DVD's on that machine (no storage space) but on my "newer" machine ripping is a breeze. I backed up the kids disney collection, now they can watch them any time without damaging the discs.

I know if you plug in a usb storage device it will pop up so you can play/view the files but I haven't tried copying anything from there.

Best thing would be to give it a shot. 15-20 minutes you'll be up and running. Run it for a week or 2 and you'll be hooked, looking for more hardware/storage space.

It should be very suitable. KnoppMyth doesn't include support for encrypted DVDs, so you'll have to added the library that handles this yourself. I've not done it, but I'm almost certain MythGallery will import pictures. I don't know if MythMusic will import audio.

Will download it tonight and find out! Are normal Shop DVD's encrypted?

Yes.

Hi,

256 mem min 384 is great and gives very good stability. By stability I mean that with a marginal mem size, sometimes the frontend might exit back to the desktop. I find this seemed to be caused by taking to long to pull something out of swap.

I have a friend running R5F27 on a 366mhz box. He just doesn't do video or tv with it.

Mike

Not to get to Bill Clinton-ey, but I think it depends on what the definition of "Shop" is.

If "shop" means "store-purchased" then absolutely. They're probably ALL encrypted.

If "shop" means "in-house produced" then I'd bet they're NOT encrypted.

I bring this up, because if Videos are being produced in-house. Then odds are the DVD's source material is probably avi or mpeg, which would be directly usable without the need to make the DVD, and rip the DVD.

More specifically, it is not possible to encrypt a duplicated or burned DVD.

It is only possible to encrypt a DVD that is commercially manufactured (glass master, stamping out layers, gluing them together, etc.). That usually limits it to movies and discs that get a wide release.

I've tested on P3-500MHz and found it to be clearly insufficient for showing fluid motion pictures. On a P3-800MHz it would run reasonably fluidly with only a very occasional hesitation. I'd say that the hardware limit is right there. They were both using 128MB memory and SD digital TV and IBM:s internal graphics. If you have better graphics adapters than I had, your setup might pass.

Cheers,
/Chris

_________________
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For acceptable playback of DVD's, it's not JUST the CPU. If you run the monitor at DVD resolution (I forget the exact number) or just run a normal TV, there will be no scaling, and therefore less overhead. Also if you have an MPEG decoder, then the CPU just about comes out altogether.

I had perfectly acceptable DVD playback within Windows 98 on a 400MHz AMD K6-II (Pentium II competitor) The trick was I had a Creative Labs MPEG decoder card --DxrII I think.

And c'mon, if Windows 98 can do it, Linux can do it better...