When the going gets tough, the tough sniff packets.
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Since upgrading my media PC to Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”, pulseaudio can’t play files with AC3 audio. Unfortunately this includes all of my ripped DVDs, which were encoded with AC3 pass-through audio. If I play such a file in Miro, the video hangs after a few seconds. If I play it in Totem, the same happens but a pop-up is also displayed: “pa_stream_writable_size() failed: Connection terminated”.
I fixed it by downgrading Pulseaudio to the karmic version. Here is how.
The game of global whack-a-mole continues, and it does not favour those holding the mallets. tvrss.net, formerly my source for RSS feeds of torrents of my favourite TV shows, is likely down for good. You can search eztv.it for individual torrents directly, but why? showrss.karmorra.info is already up, and it’s even better than tvrss.net. Now I have one custom feed for all my shows, and it automatically filters out duplicates and resolutions I don’t want.
Tags: htpc
As I mentioned in my last post, I now have a Home Theater PC (HTPC). Want to look under the hood?
I recently bought a Shuttle X27D to use as a Home Theater PC (HTPC). The reviews of this hardware run from disappointing to average, but I’m reasonably happy with it. It’s quiet (just one small fan for the GPU, and none for CPU, case, or power supply), uses little power (I measured it at 32 W in full operation), and the analog audio jack on the motherboard has no discernable noise in the audio stream (unlike my Dell Vostro 1500 laptop).
Unfortunately, the Intel 945G graphics processor can’t reliably handle 720p @24 frames video. I tested with a downloaded copy of Sita Sings the Blues, and it dropped frames as the animated fireworks exploded during the title sequence. It was fine with most of the rest of the film. Still, it means I’m likely to stick to upscaled 480p video. Which is far better for my bandwidth usage.
Naturally, I ran into some problems setting it up.
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