On this week we were able to completely resolve our issue with getting sound and KDE up and running. The Gentoo docs aided us well in accomplishing both tasks. Although this was a great victory, mainly because no PVR system would be complete without sound, getting Freevo to play DVDs was truly the highlight of the week. We encountered several obstacles before reaching this point but after several hours we were able to see the fruit of our labor.

Here is this week's completed task:

Installing Freevo

Installing Freevo was straight ward. After downloading the Freevo code we were required to type the lines below and then on to configuring.

[user@host]$ ./configure

[user@host]$ cp freevo_config.py local_config.py

[user@host]$ ln -s /path/to/freevo_source /usr/local/freevo

Configuring Freevo

The link above gave us information on the three main configuration files for Freevo. The first is called freevo.conf, it stores basic information about resolution, binary paths, and drivers. The second is freevo_config.py that stores everything else. The third local_config.py overrides all settings in freevo_config.py. The Freevo team suggests making changes to local_config.py and leaving freevo_config.py in its original state.

Installing Xine

We could have use either Xine or Mplayer since they both are used to play and record audio and video. The best part is that they are free video player for UNIX. This step was very time consuming but finally we were able to work out the bugs and get it to play a DVD. We are still experiencing one problem, DVD play back takes a long time to start (about 15 minutes), but it does not seem to be a major issue because we may be able to fix problem using the instruction below.

(This points to a region code problem. Some versions of libdvdcss can playback DVDs from other regions than the RPC-2 DVD drive is set up for, but this usually means a cryptographic attack (which takes time) has to be used to access the DVD. Here we can download a tool to set the region code of RPC-Drives here: link .)