On Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 12:17:46AM -0000, Robert wrote:
Now that i'm on the mailing list i wonder if anyone could help me.I'm looking to build a media centre pc around Linux and was wondering whether there was anything i should look out for e.g.tv cards etc?
DVB-T (ie Freeview) is the way forward; this means you'll get an mpeg2 stream rather than having to compress analogue TV yourself. I'm not sure what the card of choice is these days.
As for software, I like VDR (http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr/) - it doesn't look fancy, but it does the job nicely. If I wasn't using that I'd look at MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org/) which is very spiffy, but was a lot slower when I looked a couple of years ago. The other option is FreeVo (http://freevo.sourceforge.net/), which I discounted for reasons I can't remember.
The difficult bit is hooking it all up to a TV. If you just want to watch stuff on a monitor you're ok, otherwise you need a card with decent TV out and Linux support. Or if you're lucky enough to have a TFT/plasma TV then you can probably just hook VGA up to it directly. (I want this. When HDTV gets properly standardised I'm saving all my pennies for a TV that can do 1920x1080 natively. Yum.)
Also i would like to know what the in game on Linux is at the moment and why?
No idea what's currently in, but I'm sure we're due to lose another few nights to FreeCiv at some point soon.
J.