Eddie's Fancy

I’ve been using an ancient ShuttleX running MythTV as a media PC for years now but it was getting very long in the tooth. The fans were too loud, it ran too hot, and wasn’t fast enough to play HD video without shearing.

I wasn’t planning on building a new computer right now given the economy, but two things changed my mind. First, I started playing around with Boxee and quickly became very happy with it even though it’s still alpha. Secondly I came across an intel atom based Mini-ITX motherboard for $80 with S-Video out for $80. Throw in a case, memory and hard drive and the total cost was a tad over $200, that I could handle.

A few minutes of Googling indicated that all the features I wanted with work with Ubuntu so I ordered the parts from New Egg and Buy.com on Friday and waited for Tuesday to come around for delivery.

Hardware

Parts ordered were:

• Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard
• 2GB Kingston RAM stick
• Rosewill Smart RS-MI-01 BK Mini ITX Tower
• a Western Digital hard drive

I’d scavenge the DVD drive and PCI wireless card from the previous computer.

The board has two SATA connectors, one of which I’d use for the hard drive, one PATA connector for my old DVD drive, one slot for RAM, one PCI slot (for the wireless card) , front and back audio connectors (which I would only use for initial testing) and most importantly a rear S-Video output.

Here’s a side view of the case:

There’s room for a 5.25″ inch drive on top, a floppy (unused) and a 3.5″ drive on the opposite side.

The first problem I ran into involved my stubby short fingers. They made it difficult to get a good grip on the I/O back panel and pop it into place, plus pressing the motherboard tight enough against it to line up with the mounting holes. There’s not a lot of room above the screws, luckily I had one of these ratcheting screwdrivers:

Which made it much easier to get in there and tighten down the screws. The connectors on the case were very well labeled and the reference sheet for the motherboard allowed me to make quick work of assembling everything. I ran into two issues with cables. At first I routed the SATA cable the wrong was and was unable to disconnect it from the main board. No amount of hand pulling would get it out. A quick tug with pliers worked but damaged the cable end. Luckily I had spares in my parts box. Also the standard ribbon cable for use with the PATA DVD drive didn’t seem to work, so I fell back on the high quality PATA cable with a round, shielded cover from the parts box.

Software

First big test, power on. No magic smoke! I tried to boot the memtest86 CD discovered the PATA cabling issue. Swap that out and ran memtest86 for a few hours. Once that passed, I went ahead with installation.

For a while I’ve been using Ubuntu on everything Linux based except for the server which I still ran on Debian for stability reason. So far Ubuntu seems to be the perfect blend of stability and ease use. Fedoroa changes too often and too frequently had software issues. Debian is too out of date for desktop use.

I grabbed a Ubuntu 8.10 disk, booted up, and everything installed like a hitch. It’s times like these I’m glad I bought a 100 foot Cat5 cable. I didn’t have to worry about getting the wireless network setup immediately.

One issue I was expecting was trouble with the intel driver and S-Video out. I connected a spare TV and sure enough nothing would sync. I installed the alternate drivers discussed here and was able to get a 1024×768 mode working. Using xrandr I was able to see many other modes listed, but few would work reliably. Once I found a compatible TV mode (720×576), I ran into the issue of getting the computer to boot into that mode with only a TV connected.

This helped at first, I created a custom /etc/X11/Xsession.d/45custom_xrandr-settings script to set the correct mode on X11 start if an external TV is connected. It seemed to work fine until Gnome started. A few minutes of googling pointed me here, Gnome thinks it knows best and tries to override your xrandr settings. A tweak in the gconf-editor disables this and now it will boot into the correct mode when the TV is connected.

Now the big step, install Boxee. Everything seemed to work at first but quickly the video and audio would either not work, playback at incorrect speeds, or die completely. Back to Google and a look at the logs. PulseAudio is apparently a big issue with Boxee. I disabled with with a few edits to various config files (lost my notes, sorry) and everything seemed to work.

For the actual audio solution, I pulled out the USB – Toslink adapter I had been using on the previous Media PC. This came with a Sony MD Recorder and I love it, the audio quality is fantastic and work out of any USB port. I hope it never breaks because I have idea how to replace it. On the previous installs this always was a major pain to get working, but I had not issues at all this time. I edited the module configuration file to make sure the usb audio module was enabled and was set to the default audio output in the alsa configuration.

I also plugged in my USB IR transceiver and installed LIRCD selecting MCE2 as my remote type. Worked like a champ first time.

I moved the computer into my stereo shelf and started playing with Boxeee.

Boxee

As of right now I’m using build 0.9.8.4826 of Boxee and am pretty happy with the results. Most things work, but there are a few nagging issues.

It randomly crashes. To be expected since it’s alpha software and it’s not enough to prevent me from enjoying it, but more stability would be nice. The Last.FM plugin seems to either crash or lock up every time I use it.

It won’t play DVDs. This may be a hardware or Ubuntu issue since mplayer doesn’t work with a disk either, but it is annoying. I may buy a new SATA drive next month and try it out.

Hulu.com won’t work through Boxee. Not their fault but hopefully will be addressed. For now I can use it through Firefox and it looks great.

The auto scanning and metadata lookup for TV shows does not work. I’ve read every thread on the forums about this and tried every suggestion but nothing worked. I was able to manually select one episode, have it search thetvdb.com for the tv show, and then apply the results to the entire directory. I don’t add shows often so this will work until a new build/fix is released.

Also, Boxee won’t seem to playback a copied DVD file structure even though the wiki says it will. Creating an iso image from the directory does work so I’m happy. The menu system is a bit broken, the highlights displayed but not the background image, but as I mainly ripped DVDs to a divx file this isn’t really an issue for me.

So far I’ve been very happy with the results. I mainly use the computer for playing back video files but the integration of streaming content of the internet is fantastic. cbs.com and others have a large amount of free, legitimate content available. Once the code matures and it becomes more stable and the hulu.com situation is resolved this will be a kick ass product.

Edit to add

JonnyG asks about hard drive installation. Below is a scan of the installation guide that came with the case. The 3.5″ drive installs on its side on the right side of the case. Click for the full version.