Tips and tricks for your HTPC

Doing your own research on a HTPC

Google is a powerful tool. Most of my research came from using Google. Type in a keyword, an error message, or anything you have a question on and hunt for answers. If you do need to do research and think I should have covered it, read the conclusion page and e-mail me with what you had to find.

Getting a good price on hardware

I always start off with Pricewatch.com. It's an automated web site that allows companies to compete for the best prices on hardware. Once you know what hardware you want, go there and see what the cheapest prices are. If you can find something at a local store within 10% then you're doing well. Using Pricewatch also helps you from being ripped off because you know how much it can cost. Froogle (A Google beta site) is also a good place for locating low prices on hardware. I found my rare sound card this way. Newegg is also another place to get low prices. They have a decent warranty plus they have good technical detail and specs on the hardware.

Auto login and startup

My favorite is the ability to have Linux automatically login as a user on boot and start MythTV. Depending on which graphical login manager you use, it's possible to have it login as a system user without prompting for a password or user name. To do this you need to edit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf or /etc/kdm/kdm.conf or /etc/xdm/xdm.conf. In the gdm configurations files there is a line labeled like, "AutomaticLoginEnable=false". Change the false value to true. Later in the file there will be a line labeled like, "LocalNoPasswordUsers=". Put the user name you wish to have login automatically. Such as "LocalNoPasswordUsers=mythtv". Next time you boot your computer it will login as this user. If you are using kdm or xdm instead of gdm, the lines that need to be changed will not be labeled the same. If you read through the kdm or xdm configuration file you should see lines that mean the same thing.

Partioning for the media

My root partition is 3GB that holds the Linux installation. It is on a 30GB drive. The other 27GB on the drive holds a partition with my music collection (all encoded myself from my CD's, and it's only 5GB anyway) I have all HDTV stored on a 180GB hard drive by itself. By doing this I won't run out of space on my root file system from HDTV recording (which could cause bad things to happen). If I need to switch hard drives, or add another, by having all my media on it's own partition (or in this case a drive for HDTV), it saves me from loosing that data if I have to reinstall the OS or if I want to add another drive and do software raid. It also helps in that I can get full throughput on that drive when recording HDTV. Without it recording HDTV to it's own disk, I had rare stuttering of music at times when I was recording 4 HDTV streams at once. One drive was able to write 4 streams, but it could not read at the same time. This would not have happened if I was using a second large drive and software raid.

Adjusting XV's colors when using a DVI display -- If using an NVidia card

Since DVI is a pure digital signal, sometimes a display unit will not let you adjust brightness, contrast, or other video functions when using this type of input. Why? I can't think of a good reason. Although the color of DVI is "perfect" that doesn't mean how you see it is. Take for instance when you use a projector. The size and brightness of a room can greatly effect how bright the image is. To get a good brightness and contrast when your display device won't let you change it do the following. Apt-get, emerge or download the nvidia-settings program. Grab a DVD that has a THX Optimizer on it. (Alladin, Toy Story (II), Monsters Inc, are a few that do). Fire up Xine in window mode, not full screen. Make sure Xine is using the XV video output as this always looks the best. As you go through the THX Optmizer menu's, use the nvidia-settings program to change the options listed under the X Video menu. You'll notice that the changes you made didn't change anything. Once you have made a little change though, grab the window showing the DVD and change the size -- It will update to the new color settings when you change the size. When you're happy, quite the nvidia-settings program. Your changes will take place until you restart X (or log out and back in) If you lose the settings run 'nvidia-settings -l' and it will load your last changes for you, by reading your ~/.nvidia-settings-rc file.

If you're not using XV, you can try changing the other general color settings, but those do not effect X-Video in any way. Although I use mplayer to watch all movies, I still use Xine to watch DVD's that I'd like to use the DVD menu's on them (For bonus material and so on) and for calibration like this.

I also found that upping the Digital Sharpness in NVidia-settings also improves the picture quality. I keep mine at 13, but each display device is different. I found that going over 14-15 caused sharp edges to be too sharp and not look quite right. Around 0 was very soft/blurred, but I was happies with about 12. I have yet to decide what to do with digital vibrance. I'll have to see what "real color" should be, but this option makes all colors brighter.

Turning on powersave for Athlon CPU's

cip.uni-trier.de/nofftz/linux/Athlon-Powersaving-HOWTO.html has a how-to on using command line setpci commands or an athcool application to set an AMD Athlon CPU into a powersaving state. There are some known bugs in that it can cause jumpy music and video playback as well as slow down ultra-dma but this depends on the motherboard so be aware of that.

Hotkey support

Other HTPC sites

Next Page