Category Archives: Software

Let the pictures walk…

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Earlier than I actually thought I could finalize my new media center and it’s now up and running. Like I mentioned in a few posts before it’s a dual-boot system running Windows 7 as a “gaming system” and Linux Mint as the real movie and multimedia plattform. The Linux system itself uses to play everything that I tried, even HD movies with nearly no lags. Well, nearly, I noticed a little disturbing vsync problem while watching videos. It’s more noticable in HD movies than it’s in normal SD movies. By now I haven’t found a solution for that but the Ubuntu/Mint community is very huge and I am pretty sure that I’m not the only one with this issue. As soon as I have found solution, I will post it right here in this blog.

I also checked the gaming performance under Windows 7 with Devil May Cry 4 and Street Fighter IV. DMC4 runs at an average FPS of 45 with AA at 8 and AF at 8. The details are mainly set to super high. This is a satisfying result according to the fact that there’s “only” a GeForce 9800GT Green Edition with 512MB video RAM inside the system. I guess, I don’t have to mention that I run the games at a full HD resolution. The Benchmark results of SFIV are pretty similiar to ones I got in DMC4. I’m pretty sure that I’ll do some more benchmarks within the next days and check the performance. Till now I am very happy with the new system and it was a good choice to move the hardware to a new chassis that is not that noisy than the one before…

We’re reaching multimedia, baby!

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After being away in beautiful France for nearly two and recharging my batteries and simply staying away from everything that looks like complex work on a machine simply called computer I built up my new media center after getting back home. And of course catching enough sleep. The hardware moved from my old ‘I-don’t-know-the-exact-name’ case to a Thermaltake Element S VK60001W2Z case which is much quieter than the one before and can hold much more hard drives. On the final stage the case will hold nine hard drives with an overall capacity of something around 4 – 5 TB.

The media center was built for two things. First it’s a simple media center for listening to music, watching movies and pictures or simply surfing the web. Got it? Yap… Secondly does this PC replace a game console. Thanks to the fact that Xbox 360 controllers also work on Windows very well I can play a lot of games while lying on the couch. Well, of course I will I use other game controllers as well because I’m gaming nerd I have special controllers for every game genre.

For gaming I use Windows 7 Pro 64bit as operating system and for the whole multimedia thing my choice fell on Linux Mint because it’s pretty lightweight, got a great multimedia performance and I just like the overall file handling under linux because I can arrange a variety of disks much more comfortable.

The hardware itself is not very luxurious but will fit the matters. It’s an AMD 9550 CPU built on a Gigabyte DDR2 motherboard stuffed with 4GB RAM. The graphics accelerator is a Gainward 9800GT and the sound will be put out through a cool SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium. By now there’s only stereo output because I don’t have a surround speaker system but this will follow within the next two or three month. I am going to stuff the machine with multimedia content within the next days and then I will finally see how it works and give it a review right here in this blog.

New media experience

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I bought me a new TV a few weeks ago and yesterday was the first day where I integrated my unused but very powerful third PC into the whole multimedia system. By now there is no OS installed but in the near future I am going to install Windows 7 and Fedora on this PC. Windows 7 will be a kind of gaming console replacement system (DMC4 on a 40″ TV will kick ass) and the parallel installed Fedora will be the media center and “internet-machine”. I have chosen Fedora because the overall performance of the system is way better than Windows 7 and I don’t like the MC which is integrated into Windows 7 very much.

Actually I am not very sure about running two systems on a media center but the file handling sharing options are much easier than they are on Windows. Like I said Windows 7 will only be there for gaming, such as a nice Street Fighter IV session or a competition in Pro Evolution Soccer and Fedora will be the movie master. Another thing I am not sure about for the moment is, which media center software I should use under Fedora, mythTV or moovida, or if I should completely leave it and just use VLC or SMPlayer and customize the GUI of Fedora in that way that it is minimal but ultra functional.

One thing that is really annoying and disturbing is that the case, where the whole hardware is installed, is pretty loud and noisy. I am going to fix this in the nearby future by simply moving to another case that uses less but bigger fans and includes more 3.5″ slots. By now I have a lot of cooling boxes built in to the case for my hard drives but all these 40mm fans do too much noise so you’re not able to watch a movie in a friendly and silent environment. Well, well… there’s still a lot to do, but there’s no hurdle that cannot be taken…

Number Thirteen – back to Fedora

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I wasn’t very lucky with my OpenSuSE 11.2 system that was running on my mail and internet machine. Besides mail and internet I also use this PC for listening to music and watching some movies. Especially when I tried to watch HD movies SuSE fell down on his knees and were begging for mercy. Another very disturbing fact was that the soundserver crashed very often and curiously, mostly after Adobe Flash was active (even a few hours after). I switched from Fedora to OpenSuSE because Fedora crashed or freezed very often but afterwards I found out that some memory settings were chosen wrong. So now it’s time to turn back to Fedora and gain back more speed and bleeding edge repositories.

Unfortunately the installation of Fedora 13 failed a few before I finally made it to get working straight. One massive problem was an X server the did not want to come up after installing the proprietary nVidia drivers. I was able to fix this with a workaround first, adding nomodeset to the kernel boot parameters, and finally setting a fixed display mode (e.g. vga=773).

Fedora logo by ~Mola-mp

The final installation of the whole codec and media player bunch (e.g. kaffeine, smplayer, amarok etc.) went very well, except VLC player that still won’t work but this doesn’t really matter because SMplayer is my new favourite player.

Skype was another problem child because it is still an i386 application and it still requires i386 dependencies and for some reasons Fedora 13 x86_64 does not find the correct depencies and also does not install them. So I was able to install Skype via the Skype repo but it wasn’t working out of the box. I  finally found, after some research, the packages that are needed to get it working, just install the following

yum install libXv.i686*
yum install libXScrnSaver.i686*
yum install qt.i686
yum install qt-x11*.i686
yum install libsigc++ libsigc++.i686 qt.i686 qt

Until now everything is working fast and stable and I think that it is not going to change in the future. Finally I am very happy to be back to Fedora country especially because of the buggy package management system that is included in OpenSuSE with all its dumb priorities and messing up the system update.