Razor_109 Wrote:I was wondering did someone else tried the Asus P5E-VM HDMI yet? I know BLKMGK has it but didnt get the Onboard Intel GMA X3500 running, but didnt try that much I thought. <snip>
No, I didn't try very hard. It all loaded up fine but XBMC ran pretty darned slow. I went to Intel's WEB page for drivers and couldn't figure out what it was I needed to do to install them. Now, I'm not stupid but I'm also no wizard at Linux and it seemed an awful lot like they sort of were assuming a level of proficiency I don't yet have. I spent a little time at it but not too much. Having used ENVY with an NVIDIA card, having that NVIDIA card sitting next to me, and not finding much help on the Intel site I just ditched it. Honestly from everything I've read that video chipset isn't really strong although I'll grant we're not pushing the video card here too much. My primary concerns had been some sort of digital audio output, an ASUS board w/Intel chipset, and that form factor - my choices at NewEgg were limited so it was for that and not the video that I bought the board. That is NOT a cheap board either
It might have been nice to have the video work better but it wasn't critical, NVIDIA was path of least resistance.
As for HD-DVD.... there's a few things to bear in mind. First is the UDF format is 2.5 and for some damned reason Ubuntu isn't supporting 2.5 yet. It's a patch for a kernel module although one nice guy was willing to compile and post a version for me on the Ubuntu forums. After replacing it I still couldn't read the disks much less play them, Windows beckoned. Supposedly once you can read them some of them are NOT copy protected. I cannot verify that although I do now have my drive hooked to a Vista box and had it on XP too. I'm told Vista has UDF2.5 support, XP needs it added but AnyDVD solves all. Then comes the next hurdle ASSuming you get the damned .EVO files off of your media. That hurdle is playback - nothing, and I mean NOTHING "open", plays the files. Not VLC and no not mPlayer either last I looked - and some of the devs out there get pretty touchy when prodded about it. On Windows there are two apps to play them, one of which is supposedly crappy\broken, the other much better but has recently been patched to NOT play from HDD anymore - cute. Rodalpho if you've actually PLAYED one of those .EVO streams in Linux and have solid info on this I'm all ears, methinks you're just assuming it works. I just tried Transformers and while Gnome Movie Player thought it could play it and downloaded GStreamer CODECs to try all I got was screeching and no video...
So, that means that you need to transcode to another format. This is good since the video files are HUGE! HD-DVD is supposedly maxxing out at 15Gig? but I've seen bigger files, 26Gigs for Transformers. I RIP with AnyDVD-HD on Vista. I have researched transcoding too... For starters there's NO one tool to do the job. You will also find that depending on the disk the audio and possibly the video is in different varying (from disk to disk) formats. In order to transcode it you must first separate the video from the audio, this isn't too bad to do. Then you have to compress the video - I used X.264 with good settings on King Kong. 80HOURS later my 2.6Ghz AMD puked out a file, I've yet to try it on my new E8400 clocked to 4Ghz but it should be noticeably quicker
Now comes the fun part, the Audio! So far I've found some patched version of FFMPEG that supports EAC but the end result was a file full of static along with the audio - it's bugged apparently. When done I had a 12Gig MKV file that played smooth as silk on LinuXBMC but had crappy audio. I never watched it all the way through though so I do not know if the sound ever lost track with the video (a common issue) nor have I found a better way to compress these. I now own like 10-12 HD-DVD but my 360 puked. I watch ALL of my DVD (600+ and counting!) via XBMC on my XBOX right now (VOB\IFO issues in Linux) but would really like to watch these that way too! I'd very much like to make this happen if anyone has found a much better way - MKV is my target container and X.264 the compressor I wanted to use. Lord knows I spent enough time trying on the monkey movie, a bad choice for testing too since it's so long.
So, while I do not want to take this conversation too far off the rails talking about HD-DVD crap, that has been my experience thus far -
not a good one. This was all done on Windows, mostly on XP, but I doubt that Linux would yield better results
yet. There's tools in the works I'm sure but thus far nothing pushbutton for dummies that this dummy has found.
P.S. Blue-Ray isn't any better once it's ripped and apparently ripping is harder. Sony can bite me!
If someone else has had a better\different experience let's please talk about it in another thread instead of this one <sigh>
The ffmpeg code I had could apparently read it but decoding the audio seems to be an issue. I think the code I used had EAC code written for one of Google's Code Summer things and I found more than one person complaining about the static when using it to transcode. I know XBMC isn't using mPlayer but I *think* the ffmpeg code is a help so my fingers are crossed that eventually we'll get it in XBMC but I'll understand if it's not there tomorrow:p I'm trying to compile ffmpeg from SVN now, we'll see how it goes, I'll try mPlayer too while I'm being adventurous - at least I'd be more sure what to do with it! I appreciate the info on these packages...
. CODEC issues for audio and no video so far... <shrug>
