Was tipped off about this fantastic article from a recent Ubuntu Uk Podcast. The hardware looks pretty interesting an could make a great HD frontend for MythTV with VDPAU enabled. There’s a good post about trying VDPAU in MythBuntu on the forums but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet as I don’t have one of the supported GPUs.
Anyway, just thought the article was so good it was worth pointing out for anyone that might be looking for a cheap, near silent HD frontend.
I know DTS is all the rage at the moment but some DTS soundtracks have VERY LOUD LOUD BITS and very quiet quiet bits. This is great for the cinema or those people lucky enough to live in a detached house, but for my 2 bed flat it’s a bit over the top. To level things out mplayer can normalise your movie’s volume in realtime so that explosions are at the same volume as conversations. To enable normalisation add the following switch to the launch command for mplayer:
-af volnormSo for example on your frontend navigate to “Utilities / Setup” -> “Setup” -> “Media Settings” -> “Video Settings” -> “Player Settings” and set the “Default Video Player” to:
mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv -subfont-text-scale 3 -af volnorm -cache 8912 -cache-min 4 -lavdopts threads=2:fast:skiploopfilter=all -sws 0 %s
You may find it easier to connect to the mythconverg database and set the VideoDefaultPlayer to the value above for the host machine.