Initial Setup

To get things started, pretty much everything worked out of the box in so far as what was advertised — the Philips universal remote never advertised explicit compatibility with my IR receiver. On the other hand, I had it controlling both my TV and sound receiver in under five minutes. Likewise, once I found out which driver to use with my USB IR receiver, LIRC was very straightforward to configure.

The Problems

As it turns out, there was no device code in the Philips documentation for Microsoft Media Center Edition remote compatibility, so I was on my own. I tried using the learning feature of the remote with mediocre results. Sure, it would eventually learn and reproduce given IR codes but the lag time associated with learned codes on the remote was astonishingly bad. Not to mention that pressing and holding a button was out of the question with learned codes. Try scrolling through hundreds of movies that way.

The Solution

I was able to find a preprogrammed mode for the universal remote that actually made independent use of [almost] all of the buttons on there, and put the remote into that mode. As it turns out, such a mode for the Philips universal remote is the for the ReplayTV DVR. Then I taught LIRC to understand the codes out of that mode using irrecord.

The Outcome

Perfection.

Definitions & Limitations

First, I should provide some definitions and/or limitations; in order to make any claims we first need to lay down some commonly accepted premises. I’m not going to argue that the following definitions are universally correct or even that they represent any general consensus; this is just how I define the following terms and what these definitions mean — subjectively — to me.

1080p

This one is going to be controversial. Technically speaking, a video is defined as within the 1080p standard if (a) its picture is progressive (non-interlaced) and (b) the picture is made up of 1,080 rows of pixels. What is implied but not specifically stated in this definition is that the aspect ratio of a 1080p picture is 16:9, yielding a resolution of 1920×1080. However, since many movies are filmed in wider aspect ratios, commercial 1080p media is often letterboxed in order to avoid cropping. As such, for my purposes, I define 1080p to be any picture with 1,920 columns of pixels.

H.264

The H.264 codec is an ugly multi-headed beast. The specification for this particular video codec provides many different profiles which all require different amounts of processing power to encode or decode. There are all sorts of available ‘options’ within the standard and many of them probably require a supercomputer just to decode (in 1080p) in realtime. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll say that we’re dealing with the baseline or main H.264 profiles, using a reasonable amount of b-frames and reference frames — say, one to three — at a reasonable bitrate of about 10mbit (average) for 1080p films, using CABAC. Most of my test clips were encoded using the wonderful x264 open-source H.264 encoder.

Hardware

When I set out to build a Home Theater PC (HTPC), I wanted to keep 1080p H.264 playback in mind, and knowing that this problem is computationally difficult, I bought fairly high-end hardware with budget somewhat in mind. I won’t argue for or against my hardware, since that’s a whole different debate better suited to people more so inclined. I will say that my hardware works me.

Processor

Whilst not getting into the AMD vs. Intel debate, I will say this: I feel that going with AMD is more cost-effective. At time of purchase, the chip I bought had just had a huge price drop and as such became quite attractive. Once I got the components together and verified that everything worked, I overclocked this bad-boy from its stock 3.0Ghz (200Mhz x 15) to 3.15Ghz (210Mhz x 15) just to squeeze a bit (5% to be precise) out of it. Whilst I could get it to run at 3.3Ghz, it wasn’t stable and I wasn’t willing to bump the voltages up too much on the stock cooling I have. Currently this processor runs at around 35°C idle and around 65°C under load.

Motherboard

This is where I spent a lot of time researching. I wanted a motherboard that had as many integrated components as possible. Most motherboards these days have integrated sound but not all have integrated sound with optical out, which was an absolute necessity for me. I was also looking for a motherboard with integrated video. I found this one with the added bonus of having integrated HDMI. I couldn’t get the sound pass-through over HDMI working under Linux, but since I have an optical connection to the receiver anyways I’m not too fettered about it.

RAM

Quite simply, just whatever cheap dual-channel 800Mhz RAM compatible with my motherboard I happened to find on newegg.com.

Video

As I found out just after putting all of the hardware together, ATI’s drivers for Linux do not support XVideo (hardware accelerated video scaling, color-space conversions, and display), rendering the integrated video card on the motherboard less useful. I decided to buy the cheapest PCI-Express NVIDIA card I could find, making sure that it was fully supported with the latest NVIDIA Linux drivers. More on this in the software section below.

Display

Most new HDTVs now have some sort of direct-from-computer input — mine has a DVI port right on the back. Some HDTVs, however, do some overscanning and other image processing on the signal received, even for digital signals. Depending on the source, this can be good or bad, but in general when attaching a computer to a display you want a 1:1 (no overscan) pixel mapping. Fortunately my display supports this via its DVI port.

Software

There was no doubt in my mind that I’d be running Linux, so hardware acceleration of H.264 playback was immediately a no-go: the driver support just isn’t there yet. It turns out that I’m pretty much stuck with ffmpeg’s H.264 decoder for playback (I won’t get into the controversial CoreAVC-on-Linux fiasco here other than to say I’m not about to go hacking up mplayer code to get CoreAVC on Linux under 64bit). But there’s more to playback than just decoding the input video stream; once the stream is decoded, there is an often necessary colorspace conversion to do, there may or may not be some scaling involved, and of course you have to get the decoded image to the display somehow, which can take significant amounts of compute time.

Decoding

The ffmpeg H.264 decoder is really great with one major caveat: it’s not multithreaded. This means that no matter how many cores you have, H.264 decoding will use exactly one. I hear there’s some work being done on parallelizing said decoder, but as of yet I’ve heard of no working prototypes let alone a release. Knowing this is mostly why I wanted such a high clock speed for my main processor, regardless of how many cores it has — for sure I would have bought a cheaper, slower dual-core processor had the ffmpeg H.264 decoder been capable of taking advantage of two cores simultaneously.

That having been said, there are some decoding options that you can pass to ffmpeg’s H.264 decoder via mplayer that will improve performance at the cost of quality. Specifically, there’s the ability so skip all of the in-loop filters (deblocking, mainly), which should yield a performance increase of ranging from zero to three hundred precent or more depending on the source material and encoding options. Simply invoke mplayer with the option -lavdopts fast=1:skiploopfilter=all — you can read more about these in your mplayer manpage. If your processor just isn’t capable of handling H.264 videos you’re trying to play, a good first pass is to try disabling in-loop filters. If your processor still can’t handle it, it’s time for you to upgrade — there’s pretty much nothing else you can do.

Displaying

Once a video stream has been decoded, it is typically sent to a display for viewing. Often this involves colorspace conversions and/or scaling. In my case, with 1080p playback, there is typically no scaling necessary as my display is exactly as large (at least in the limiting dimension) as the image being displayed. In the case of 720p on a 1080p display, however, some upscaling needs to be done. Some upscaling and colorspace conversion computations can be done in hardware on your graphics card if your graphics drivers are capable and set up for it. One such technology under Linux is XVideo, or XV for short.

XV can handle colorspace conversions and upscaling natively in graphics hardware so that your CPU doesn’t have to burn cycles doing so. In the absence of XV, I have found mplayer’s X11 output driver to be the best on my setup. Even though the X11 processing seemingly went on in the X11 server (according to top), which of course does not run on the same core as mplayer so as to maximize performance, I found that using the X11 display driver cause a significant decrease in video playback performance — enough to drop a few frames in some test clips. Since the ATI drivers for the integrated graphics chipset on my motherboard do not provide XV capabilities at time of writing (note that this is a specific case for my video chipset, the X1250 — most other ATI chipsets boast XV support in the proprietary ATI drivers), I bought a cheap NVIDIA card that I knew would work with XV. Once I had XV working, I was able to play back clips that had previously stuttered due to dropped frames.

It is my preference, however, to not upscale videos using XV, as generally I find the results to be much better when using a decent software upscaler. This is especially visible when viewing, for example, NTSC television captures on a 1080p display. There are a number of software upscale implementations bundled with mplayer, and for most people the default will suffice. If this is a bit too CPU-intensive, though, I find that the fast bilinear algorithm does a fairly good job and is a little bit less CPU intensive than the default bicubic algorithm. To select this, simply invoke mplayer with the -zoom -sws 0 arguments. Of course, the quality of the upscale will depend on the source and the algorithm of choice, so as with anything else, try a few of the different options and go with what you prefer.

A Note On Sound

I run an optical line between my HTPC and my sound receiver and use it for both PCM and surround (Dolby or DTS) sound. While this article is, as the title suggests, about video, I feel compelled here to mention that decoding surround sound in software does take a nontrivial amount of CPU time. You’ll be much better off — for a number of reasons, compute time inclusive — sending the audio stream to a hardware decoder (read: sound receiver) for playback there. Sometimes the little bit of difference that decoding sound can make is what you’ll need to avoid a few dropped frames here and there.

I also found a great deal on SATA hard drives, so I bought two 10K RPM Raptor drives for Charlie’s server. They should provide a nice, fast, redundant replacement for the current nearly-decade-old 6GB drive that currently provides root.

I’m done spending for the next month or two.

The CPU

I’ve overclocked the 2000Mhz processor just the tiniest bit — to 2050Mhz — in order to push the total bogomips to just over 4000 (real nerds like round numbers). I don’t want to push the machine too much, as I’d instead prefer for the processor to last a lifetime (okay, I’ll settle for five years).

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 47
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 2050.033
cache size : 512 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow pni lahf_lm
bogomips : 4063.23
TLB size : 1024 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc

So that’s where it stands. I’m a bit upset about not being able to purchase the 1MB L2 cache model, but it was just too far outside my price range. Despite having the same L2 cache as Lina’s Pentium 4 (currently the processor in PowerBox) and just a 250Mhz clock speed increase, it seems to be approximately twice as fast. If I care enough (or am bored enough), I may do some proper benchmarking at some point.

The Memory

The Corsair ValueSelect RAM I bought performs well but not amazingly. It’s rated at 2.5 CAS and some users commented on review sites that they were able to run it just fine at 2. I had no such luck, though I didn’t look into it too deeply. Right now there’s two sticks at 512MB apiece (1GB total) running at 410Mhz (205Mhz DDR) in dual channel mode. Let’s just say I’m satisfied.

$ cat /proc/meminfo | head -n 1
MemTotal: 1027300 kB

The Motherboard

The motherboard is nothing short of excellent. The only thing I’d ask for above and beyond what the MSI K8N Neo4-F provides is IEEE1394 (FireWire). I can always buy a PCI card for that, though (or even PCI-Express if I really need excellent latency/bandwidth.

All of the onboard features appear to work out of the box with the Gentoo 2005.1 minimal amd64 LiveCD. I’m no kernel expert, but I was able to get the kernel working perfectly with everything I need in one shot. I have yet to play with ACPI and CPU frequency scaling (I really have no clue about this Cool 'n Quiet stuff), but I hope to get around to that eventually.

The Results

As for right now, things are working great, and I’m overjoyed with the products and service I got from both of the vendors I went with. I have posted excellent reviews for both of them in the appropriate places.

Finally, I have a stable server that actually works.

I placed an order with ZipZoomFly[2] today for two 512Mb CAS2.5 Corsair ValueSelect sticks of RAM. The order went smoothly, and should ship out (via free 2-day FedEx) tomorrow. Since the RAM hasn’t actually been shipped yet, there’s no FedEx expected delivery date for me to list here, although I expect it to come in at the latest on the 19th (the same day as the motherboard/CPU).

Assuming all of the hardware works as expected, I should end up with a pretty nice replacement server. Wish me luck!

[1] I found BZBoyz to have the best deal on the motherboard/CPU products I wanted. I searched for motherboard/CPU vendors almost exclusively via PriceWatch. I have no previous experience with BZBoyz, though they have good reviews.
[2] I found ZipZoomFly to have the best deal on the RAM I wanted. I searched for RAM vendors almost exclusively via DealRam. I have no previous experience with ZipZoomFly, though they have outstanding reviews.

Sparing the gory technical details, I’m fairly sure that Charlie’s Server cannot be revived in its current state. As a result, I’ve gone ahead and bought some replacement hardware. I’m sick of dealing with ancient hardware and want to move on into the New Age. That’s right — Charlie’s Server will break the Ghz boundary!

I couldn’t claim to know anything about modern hardware, so I had to go to other sources for some quick advice. Having hardware-crazy friends is always a good thing in times like these. I also waded through a few AnandTech articles and even some forum posts and miscellaneous informational pages here and there. I think I got a fairly good idea for what’s out there, how it works, and what I should buy for my uses.

Down to the replacement hardware, then. I’ve ordered a K8N Neo4-F motherboard from MSI as per recommendation from several friends. It’s a PCI Express board, which should be nice once we get some faster storage options out on the market (yes, I really do plan on keeping this board for a long time), and it has four of the regular 32-bit PCI slots on there as well, which is perfect for expanding my current FTP with more IDE controller cards. Most importantly, though, it carries the 1Ghz Hypertransport bus with four slots for Dual-Channel DDR400 RAM and a Socket 939 CPU slot.

The CPU I ordered, then, is the Athlon 64 3200+ (Rev. E Venice 90nm Socket 939) from AMD. Why just the 3200+ and not something faster? Simple: I had a price limit. Spending less than $250 on a motherboard/cpu combo, I think I did a good job in splitting the benefit down the middle between good motherboard and good CPU. Deciding on the Socket 939 above any other socket limited my options somewhat, but probably in a good way.

So I placed the order at BzBoyz.com and got a call the next day telling me that the CPU in the motherboard/CPU combo above was back-ordered, and would take an additional 4-5 days to ship. I decided against getting the retail box CPU that they offered for an additional $15, so I’ll just wait it out. On a related note, I have yet to purchase RAM for the new machine, but there’s no particular rush for that given the back-ordered CPU.

During this whole process, and until the new Charlie’s Server is online, I’ll be hosting the essential services of Charlie’s Server on Lina’s development machine. Thanks Lina for saving my butt!

In the end, the death of Charlie’s Server as we know it is not all bad. The good news is that (a) I won’t waste any more time trying to revive shady hardware, and (b) I’ll have a nice fast server out of it, and not have to feel guilty about spending money on replacement hardware for a machine that already works fine.

Updates will follow as new articles on this blog. Stay tuned over the next few weeks.

1. Apple replaced the hard drive. Somewhat of a let-down, but I did have a backup of most everything I needed, so it’s not a huge loss. A blessing in disguise, actually: I’ve been meaning to reformat the machine and have a nice fresh clean start, I just hadn’t gotten around to it, and was kind-of waiting for Mac OS X Tiger to be released.
   

   
2. Apple managed to rip off one of the feet of my PowerBook, as per the pictures above. The first picture is what a normal ‘foot’ on a PowerBook looks like: a dark grey circular rubber pad mounted on a light gray circular piece of plastic. The second picture is what a missing ‘foot’ looks like: no dark grey circular rubber pad mounted atop a light gray circular piece of otherwise-very-empty-looking-not-to-mention-abrasive plastic.
3. Apple also managed to put some very light abrasions dead smack in the middle of my PowerBook’s LCD. To the untrained eye, they’re pretty invisible, but I can see them fairly clearly, especially when doing graphic design on a pixel-by-pixel level. The abrasions cover about a square inch of the screen and are shallow enough not to be noticeable to touch.

I called Apple’s support line immediately when I found out about (2) and (3) — which was when I got home that day after picking up the laptop from my local authorized service location. After a few minutes of hold time, another few minutes of talking to the lower-tier support dolts, and then yet another few minutes talking to a ‘support specialist’, I had Apple’s rep apologizing to me and filling out a dispatch for a self-addressed prepaid-shipping box and packaging materials to be sent out to me. The support specialist said that she had put in the dispatch details that everything should be already paid for by Apple and there should be no cost to me at all. After a little bit of a fruitless run-around trying to get the dispatch to work through my local authorized service location rather than shipping directly to me (so as to shave off a day or two from the downtime I’d experience), I confirmed that I wanted the dispatch sent, and received the said materials in the mail two business days later.

As a side note, this may actually be another blessing in disguise: I do happen to have a dead pixel on my LCD and, while this is unacceptable to me, it is apparently acceptable to Apple — their LCD warrantee policy clearly states that an LCD with up to five dead pixels is ‘acceptable’. The Apple support specialist told me that they would have to replace my LCD. Also, seeing as how LCDs diminish in brightness with time, a new one might be a nice refresher for me and my laptop.

I plan on sending the laptop out on Monday in the hopes that I get it back sometime during that week — I’d really rather not be down over an entire weekend (these are the days I get the most work done).

I got the RadTech-branded version of the BT500 mouse in the mail yesterday. Having waited about two weeks for the thing just to be shipped out — RadTech was out of stock of the silver one I ordered — I was pretty anxious. An illustrated review follows.

Coolness factor? High, despite the logo on the top of the unit. It matches brilliantly with the aluminum on the powerbooks (except it’s shiny, which is a Good Thing(tm). What contributes most to the coolness factor? The glowing blue wheel (glows only while pairing — would be a huge battery drain otherwise).

The mouse pretty much lived up to all the great reviews I read of it (there are several linked from the RadTech site). Movement is very smooth at 800dpi, and the click action is a bit heavy (but not extremely loud) for gaming — It’s a good thing I’m not a gamer. In terms of precision, as soon as I set the sensitivity down to something reasonable for me, the mouse was much more precise than Lina’s old IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 (also pictured). The BT500 is great for everyday use; I’ve been using it for a full day now and it’s served me well. Ergonomically it’s a lot better than most mice I’ve used. Obviously no word yet on how well the battery lasts, but I expect that the reviews will be accurate in this department as well.

My only complaints about the BT500 really lie in the wheel: it’s (a) too small, and (b) has a bit of ‘wiggle-room’ to it. I’m not sure if the ‘wiggle-room’ is an intended feature, but it took a little bit of getting used to; basically, when you scroll in one direction, then switch to scrolling in the other direction immediately, there is a bit of ‘wiggle-room’ where the wheel will move in the opposite direction but scrolling will not actually be triggered. The ‘wiggle-room’ is exactly one scroll-click’s worth of scrolling region. Again, I’m not sure if this was intentional – with such a small scroll wheel it’s easy to make a mistake, and the ‘wiggle room’ allows for this.

The matching case was just too cute for me to pass up. It looks to be pretty sturdy (we’ll see how it holds up), although the zipper on it isn’t one of those big tough rugged ones (like on luggage), which I would have liked. Hey, what can you ask for when the thing is so tiny.

As you can see, the case has ‘feet’ on it in which replacement (AAA) batteries can be stored. Very handy. I do have a major complaint about the case, though: it’s too big! Yes, I typed that right: it’s too big. With the mouse inside and the case closed, the mouse has room to rattle. Not cool. I’ll have to see about lining the case with fur-like stuff or something. Perhaps I’ll post on the topic later if I do anything interesting with it.

Since pretty much all that was wrong with my PowerBook was 100% related to the seating of various components inside the chassis, opening and sealing the laptop would do the trick. Only problem was, I wasn’t about to void my warranty. So I had to send the beast in to Apple Service — I still have AppleCare.

Apple returned the computer to me two days later (quick service!) with a $30 charge and a note saying that they found nothing wrong with the unit, hence the “Diagnostic Charge”. Yeah, right. I argued a bit, and had the local tech (who happens to be a friend of mine) call Apple to inquire about exactly what was done to the machine to determine that it was A-OK. The phone call lasted all of two minutes, and the charges were dropped.

So in the end, here I am back on my old compy, and loving the return.