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PostPosted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 12:33 pm 
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Joined: Sun May 29, 2005 5:47 pm
Posts: 65
Can anyone provide more details regarding the configuration of their successful installations with this board. I am looking to pair this board with the following:

ASUS P5N7A-VM
CORE 2 QUAD Q8400 2.66G (1333Mhz)
KINGSTON 4GB DDR2 800=(2GB x 2)
HITACHI 1tb 0A38016 SATA2 3.0gb/sec 7200rpm
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250 - Model 980
HD-5500 for ATSC HD

I am also considering adding an HD-PVR and/or an HD-Homerun, but will start with the above configuration.

I am wondering what processor some of the contributors have paired with this board and what capture cards are being used. Also, if I read the thread correctly everyone is using R5.5 so far. Anyone try R6. Since, I'll be doing a clean install, I'll probably start with R6 and if it doesn't work I can always fall back to R5.5.

Thanks


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PostPosted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 7:00 pm 
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Joined: Mon Oct 09, 2006 11:27 am
Posts: 75
Location: Raleigh, NC
I'm running R6 on the p5n7a-vm board with no issues.

However, I'm using a DVI to HDMI cable, and haven't tried the HDMI out on the motherboard yet. I'm also using analog stereo out to my receiver. The only config problem I have right now is the remote in my 150 tuner card isn't working under R6 (there is a flyspray ticket for that), but I can't imagine that's related to the motherboard.

Other hardware is 2 gig memory, 2 PVR-150 cards, HD Homerun (outside the box of course), a 750Gb sata seagate drive and a sata lite-on dvd burner. Graphics is using the on-board NVidia GeForce 9300, which should be vdpau capable, though I plan to wait until that's a little less "bleeding-edge," before attempting that. The processor is an Intel e5200 ... defintely not high-end, but no issues at all with HD playback, or streaming flash via Hulu.

I plan to try to configure the HDMI and digital audio at some point, but I just got things stable again after a recent hardware failure, and I need to get the WAF rating up before attempting further "improvements" ;-)


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PostPosted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 9:03 pm 
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Posts: 65
Thanks Craigtv. It nice to know that a E5200 does the job even without vdpau. I was thinking of the Q8400 as that seems to be the sweet spot for price versus performance. My favorite motherboard store did not even offer the E5200 as a bundle with this board and the E7200 they offered was not that much less expensive. I thought I would use the higher speed CPU to some daily transcoding for the my ipod. Though I am somewhat concerned about power consumption and may reconsider my choice.


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PostPosted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 9:07 pm 
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craigtv wrote:
The processor is an Intel e5200 ... defintely not high-end, but no issues at all with HD playback, or streaming flash via Hulu.


By the way, for reference, what did you use to stream flash? Was it iceweasel?


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PostPosted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 9:33 pm 
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Joined: Mon Oct 09, 2006 11:27 am
Posts: 75
Location: Raleigh, NC
In R6 there is a different package manager, so I just installed firefox and flash from the repositories:

Code:
pacman -Sy firefox flashplugin


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PostPosted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 6:59 am 
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Joined: Mon Dec 24, 2007 9:47 am
Posts: 535
Location: Ottawa, Canada
mark60050 wrote:
Can anyone provide more details regarding the configuration of their successful installations with this board.

I am wondering what processor some of the contributors have paired with this board and what capture cards are being used. Also, if I read the thread correctly everyone is using R5.5 so far. Anyone try R6. Since, I'll be doing a clean install, I'll probably start with R6 and if it doesn't work I can always fall back to R5.5.


I have two of these boards with E8500s. I just wanted to get lots of raw horse power in case and I had seen others struggle with anything too far below 3.0GHz even on a core2 with high bit rate H.264. I didn't want to rely on VDPAU as although I think it will be generally fine, it will not deal with 100% of the situations and may lag any new CODEC developments. So far this processor has taken everything I can throw at it.

Note too that the decoders we generally use on myth will only use one core so it is important any single core can do the work (at least for now).

I use 2GB of RAM on each which is fine.

I use HDMI on one and SPDIF with DVI on the other. You will need to update ALSA for this and I cover this in the How-to section of the forum.

I have also put one in an Antec Veris Fusion Black case and the other one in a standard Antec case with a Veris Basic IR receiver in my bedroom closet. Again How-tos for both in the forum.

These are two of 4 front ends I have that are networked to my back ends where I have the tuner cards.


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PostPosted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 11:59 pm 
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christ wrote:
I use HDMI on one and SPDIF with DVI on the other. You will need to update ALSA for this and I cover this in the How-to section of the forum.


Thanks for the info your config! I just got my motherboard a few days ago and fired it up this evening. I installed R6. This was really a test run. I still need to set-up my ota antenna to pick the HD channels and I just was playing around. I don't have any of the cards configured to receive anything. In any case, I am very interested in getting HDMI audio working R6 with this board, but couldn't see how to compile the new version of ALSA on ARCH. All the instructions are for R5.5 and lower. Therefore, I assume you are still running R5.5? I may end up going that route, too. But thought I would give R6 a try for a while. Need to overcome this first hurdle. Is it true your HDMI audio is running on R5.5?


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 9:25 pm 
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Posts: 65
christ wrote:
I use HDMI on one and SPDIF with DVI on the other. You will need to update ALSA for this and I cover this in the How-to section of the forum.


I was able to get the ALSA 1.0.20 drivers compiled on R6. I was able to identify the SPDIF connector as hw:0,1 and the HDMI as hw:0,3. Using the following command I can reliably use mplayer to play digital audio from SPDIF or HDMI on demand:

Code:
# Output to optical SPDIF
mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.1  song.mp3

# Output to HDMI audio
mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.3 song.mp3


For the life of me, I cannot get the audio to play on mythfrontend. I have tried all the settings:

Code:
/dev/dsp                 # plays out of optical spdif
ALSA:hw:0,0           # no sound
ALSA:plughw:0,0     # no sound
ALSA:hw:0,3           # no sound
ALSA:plughw:0,3     # no sound


Next step is to write an .asoundrc or /etc/asound.conf file. Since you got digital audio working with mythfrontend over hdmi, is there any chance you can share your asound.conf file?

Thanks for your help!


Last edited by mark60050 on Sun Jun 21, 2009 12:01 am, edited 1 time in total.


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PostPosted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 10:22 pm 
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Joined: Sun May 29, 2005 5:47 pm
Posts: 65
Okay. I figured it out. Using this this page from the mythtv wiki

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki?title=AllensDigitalAudioHowto

I ended having to write a very simple asound.conf

Code:
 pcm.!default {
     type plug
     slave {
        pcm "hw:0,3"
        format S32_LE
     }
  }



The asound.conf could be simpler however, I added a slight variant suggested by Allen. In my home entertainment configuration, I ampassing audio over HDMI to my TV; then passing the output back to my surround sound receiver. My TV does not like pass through with out the format command. I get noise sometimes. However, with the format command the receiver still likes it. The TV does not light either way. But I can mute for that.

One critical piece that I got from Allen's wiki page is his advice on the mythfrontend settings:

Quote:
Audio output device: ALSA:default
Passthrough output device: Default
Max Audio Channels: Stereo (MUST BE SET TO STEREO as of 6/2/2009 for passthrough to work)
Upmix: Passive
Enable AC3 to SPDIF passthrough checked
Enable DTS to SPDIF passthrough checked
Aggressive sound card buffering off
Use internal volume controls off


It seems that setting "Max Audio Channels: 5.1" was another problem I had bumped into. Setting 5.1 is guaranteed to mute all audio out now. That may have been my problem in my previous post. I should go back and check, but things are working now....

Finally, I need to go back and check if the upgrade to 1.0.20 was necessary. I see that R6 ships with 1.0.18rc3. From what I read, this might be good enough for this motherboard. Now that I can speak a little ALSA, I might be able to better assess whether the upgrade was necessary. I will to a fresh install and see what fixes were absolutely necessary.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 9:53 am 
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Joined: Mon Dec 24, 2007 9:47 am
Posts: 535
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Glad to see you got this working. Did you also read:
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... sc&start=8 earlier in this thread.

You should have been able to simply change spdif to hdmi in the audio set up menus in myth. At least this works for me in R5.5.

The only mod I had to make in /etc/asound.conf was to allow music to play.


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