Hello Everyone.

I have been in the HTPC world for a bit now, and always with windows.. But a friend of mine has always been urging me to walk twards the light of Ubuntu. I have tried it on my desktop, and I like a lot of things about it.. So I thought I would see how well things work on the HTPC side.

The essential things it must do, and I hope it can, is play, at minimum, MKV blu-ray rips with flac..

I am probally going to be basing the new machine off a board with the intel 93/9400 chipset, using hdmi 7.1 lpcm off the board to my reciever. Does linux support that chipset well, and can it do 7.1lpcm?

In the windows world, playing flac cd rips in foobar using the wasapi plugin is a thing of beauty... an I am wondering how something similar is acomplished from within linux. does linux have any kind of exclusive to the soundcard mode for flac audio? I would be very intirested in this from both flac audio CD's as well as the flac inside an MKV.

3rd and final, how do you guys think it works as a DVR? I will probally be using something along the lines as the hauppage 2250 tv tuner.

Thanks guys.

If you use something like XBMC for your media you won't have a problem with the bluray rips. It pretty much plays anything and I know flac is a supported audio format. The 9300/9400 nvidia chipset will do hardware vdpau acceleration so thats a big plus. I havn't tried running hdmi audio so I can't really help there and I don't listen to music at all (except when I'm in a car) so again no help there.

As far as a dvr goes, Mythtv is pretty much in the top tier of all dvr software out there. I run mythbuntu myself with xbmc and boxee installed and easily accessible from the main mythtv menu.

Linux doesn't yet support 7.1 LPCM, and I don't know of any hardware that decodes FLAC, so I'm guessing that it's software-decoded in any OS.

Your best bet for audio is DTS over spdif or HDMI if your amp can decode it. I can even send mine a DTS-HD MA stream and it will pull out the DTS core and play it beautifully.

I'm curious about what format you convert your m2ts files to in order to put them in mkv (and what software you use). I rip my blu-rays with AnyDVD in a XP VM to a shared samba folder. I tried using tsmuxer (http://www.smlabs.net/tsmuxer_en.html), but mplayer's vdpau vc-1 codec complained about missing headers.

hmm... no 7.1 lpcm might be a deal breaker, unfortunately.

Yes, the flac's are decoded in the htpc, and sent to the sound card as a pcm stream, and in windows exclusive mode, it will bypass all the mixers and such, and go right from software to drivers for direct, unmolested output..

as for my brd ripping method, I had previously ripped all my brd's with either anydvd or dvdfab, and then I use hdbrstreamextractor (wich is a frontend for eac3to) to extract the video and audio into whatever format (I leave the video as is, and convert lossless tracks to flac), and then combine back to mkv with mkvnoolnix. So far that seems to work well for me.