www.emmes-world.de

A VIA EPIA based Media Player

based on Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (woody), MPlayer 1.0pre2

Update: I no longer have this device, I'll just keep this information for historical purposes...

Preface

This web page describes how to get TV-Out running, and how to install an appopiate OS onto the small 256MB CF card. You should be familar with a Debian installation, NFS, XFree86 configuration and building Mplayer. Of course you do everything on your own risk!

Start

We have the following stuff:

VIA EPIA Mainboard with VIA Ezra C3 CPU 800MHz, integrated Trident CyberBlate i1 graphics controller
ATX Power Supply
IDE to compact flash adapter
256MB compactflash card
128MB SDRAM PC133
an IDE DVD Drive
a TV set with Video in (don't connect it yet!)
some other stuff (Keyboard, Mouse, Coffee, Pizza...)

the EPIA Mainboard loosely built together

The hardware

For the installation we additionally need:

A Debian woody CD set or DVD
Internet access (broadband with NAT router is best)
a CRT (some old 14 inch will do)
another PC on the network, with at least 500MB free space and NFS server running, or alternatively some old hard disk
Software:
- backported XFree86 4.2.x packages (see below)
- MPlayer ([MPlayer Homepage]
- Modified X driver modules [Homepage]

Debian installation

Just install debian as usual, but these points are important:

The ethernet card is a via-rhine. Configure it to use your NAT router (you have one, right ?!? ;-)
The sound card uses the via82cxxx_audio module.
Don't run tasksel, Keep the small 256MB "harddisk" in mind!
But run dselect to remove unnecessary stuff (pcmcia-cs, ppp*, mutt, ...) Don't select any more packages at this time. Now, some more packages will be installed, and the small DF disk will become very crowded. don't hesitate to deinstall man pages and *-doc packages as well as manually delete unneeded locales, readme's etc. (except the ones you need *grin*) - you can read docs on your "big" PC, too!

Now add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:


deb http://people.debian.org/~frankie/debian woody/x421/

These sources contain updated XFree86 package, needed for the TV-Out capable XFree86 driver. Now run dselect again, do an Update, and then Select the packages

nfs-common
hdparm (to tune CD/DVD-Drive parameters)
xserver-xfree86
xserver-common
xfonts-base
xfonts-75dpi
xfonts-scalable
xterm
xutils
xlibs-dev (only necessary to build mplayer)
sapphire (a very small but nice window manager)
aumix (a small console audio mixer)

Don't install any unnecessary "recommended" or "suggested" packages. For the XFree86 settings, you can use vesa for the time being, setup the monitor timings according to your monitor, but use only 800x600 resolution.

Now, NFS-export some directory on your big PC to the EPIA, put an according entry into /etc/fstab on the EPIA system (I mounted it on /buildtemp) and mount it. Place the downloaded drivers and mplayer sources there, unpack both. (If your "big" PC is faster, do as much as possible there, but don't build mplayer there). This step is necessary, as the mplayer sources won't fit on the CF disk, but is recommended to be built on the target system.
Alternatively, you could temporarily hook up some old harddisk as secondary master or so.

TV-Out capable X11 driver

copy the new trident_drv.o to /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers, and update your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Generic Video Card"
        Driver          "trident"
        Option  "TVChipset" "1" # TV on
        Option  "TVSignal" "1"  # PAL, use 0 for NTSC and 2 for PAL-M
        Option  "TVOverscan" "1" # enlarge image to avoid a black frame arount the movie...
EndSection

Now, shutdown the EPIA, connect the TV set and power on again. It should now use the TV set. To reduce eye stress, ssh into it from your big PC to do any more text mode stuff.

Building MPlayer

cd into the mplayer source directory and do ./configure. At the end, you should see at least

 Enabled optional drivers:
    Input: ftp network edl tv mpdvdkit2 vcd
    Codecs: flac(internal) libavcodec faad2
    Audio output: oss mpegpes(file)
    Video output: xvidix cvidix vesa mpegpes(file) fbdev dga xv x11 xover tga

(If you want to use other codecs (ogg, vorbis, theora, real, ...), you need the according *-dev packages, too, but don't overload your CF disk ;-)
Then, do make && make install

Trying it out

Now the big moment: run startx. If everything works, you should see X11 on your TV! right click on the desktop, select Xterm, mount your movie CD and mplayer -fs /cdrom/$MY_FAVOURITE_MOVIE If everything works the way you like, you can remove the /buildtemp entry in /etc/fstab.

Have Fun!

Yeah, It works!