Freevo does not require an X server and can also run on a frame-buffer device - with video cards from vendors such as Matrox - so getting the geometry right is essential. In order to finish the installation you must run freevo setup (the Debian package did this automatically in my case) to set up basic things like paths of external programs, TV system, and the geometry of your display. The difficult part is to install its dependencies. Installing from source should not be a problem since Freevo is a Python program and requires no compilation. The Freevo project offers binary packages for most popular GNU/Linux distributions. Since I used to have similar problems with MythTV I suspect that the problem is caused by ATI binary drivers and not Freevo. The only crash I had was when I was listening to music and at the same time viewing a slide show of some high-resolution photos, but I wasn’t able to reproduce the problem. My media center box runs Debian Testing (Etch) with a few packages from Unstable and MPlayer from the unofficial repository. If you plan on using HD video resolutions you should get a faster system. I installed Freevo on the same system I used for MythTV - a home-built box with a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 512MB RAM, 80GB hard disk, ATI Radeon 9200 video card, and Hauppauge PVR-350 TV/radio tuner. The games plugin supports console and arcade emulators and can be configured to run modern Linux games or Windows games emulated with Wine. The image viewer, in addition to the expected slide show feature, also allows limited image editing, such as rotation and deletion. With the tach plugin - which is installed but not enabled by default - you can even have music playing in the background and do other stuff like play games or view pictures at the same time. The music player supports audio CD playback, Web and FM radio, and of course traditional digital formats such as Ogg Vorbis and MP3. Freevo uses MEncoder for recording TV, and it can use TV guides in XML format, which can be downloaded off the Net using XMLTV or similar programs. Unfortunately tvtime doesn’t support my TV card. Xine fills that gap nicely.įor TV viewing, you can use MPlayer and Xine, or if your tuner card is supported you can use tvtime instead, which claims to offer higher picture quality. I use MPlayer for all media formats except DVD video playback, since MPlayer currently has no support for DVD menus. Freevo offers no internal player, but relies exclusively on external programs like MPlayer and Xine for playing media files and viewing TV. It is written mostly in the Python programming language, which makes it hacking-friendly.Įverything you expect to find on a media center platform is present in Freevo you can listen to music, view pictures, and watch TV and video. After fiddling with custom solutions based on MPD and MPlayer, I decided to look for an alternative - which led me to Freevo.įreevo is like a window manager - an interface controlled by a remote control or the keyboard - that provides access to various media. On the other hand, I love music, and MythTV offers no easy way to listen to music from various sources, such as audio CDs and Web-based and FM radio stations. MythTV is great for watching and recording TV, but I watch TV less than four hours per week. I’ve been a happy MythTV user for a long time - you can check out my review of version 0.19 - but lately I’ve been feeling that something is missing.
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