Quote Originally Posted by lloydsmart View Post
The only thing I'm currently missing on Linux is the lossless audio bitstreaming. This is possible on windows either through PowerDVD/Arcsoft players, or through the newer builds of FFDSHOW.
Well I guess there is the ability to play a blu-ray locally (from disk) past the audio thing (not that the difference between DTS and PureHD would be noticeable on most speaker setups to most people anyway).

I thought MakeMKV was lossy actually, so it looks like I'm off there. That's really good to know though, I might have to look at converting all the blu-ray content on my atom PC to MKV then to save space (the HTPC being just a backup copy of things, the originals will always be stored as ISO's). I will definitely look into XMBC. It's funny but I think you're actually closer to getting me to recycle my Win 7 license on my HTPC than I am to making an argument for Windows. Thanks! I have a separate computer that just has a huge ISO store that I transfer to my HTPC right now because I wasn't willing to accept loss, but if lossless is available then yeah, Windows looses some arguments for sure.


Quote Originally Posted by lloydsmart View Post
There isn't a need to have a second PC running windows - I've got a bluray player in my current machine which I'm trying out as a HTPC (system 2 in my sig), and I can use the streaming feature of MakeMKV on Linux, within the machine. I just use MakeMKV to "open" the disc, then playback in XBMC, streaming within one box (program-to-program). Kind of like viewing a website that's on your own PC via http://localhost
At some point you have to introduce a Windows PC - Linux can't decrypt Blu-Ray (unless that has changed very recently). You can stream from linux to linux, but the root of the file is still Windows, no?


Off-topic:

Am I the only one who is finding that an Onkyo receiver maybe isn't the best for use with an HTPC? I mean, watching a movie or something works just fine, but the fact that it takes a second to switch audio paths to 'on' and turns them off when it doesn't hear a sound for (30?) seconds is a bother. I keep getting the last note of any notification sounds... accompanied, of course, by the loud click that the receiver makes.

Also, have you had a chance to hook into the serial port on the back of your receiver yet? My ION board has a COM header on it and I have a spare internal header to RS232 port expansion module, but I just haven't had the chance yet to look at connecting the two and digging into how to communicate between them. From my understanding you can do everything you could from a remote (and more) over a COM connection, which would make a script to tune settings much handier than programming a macro into a remote and pointing it at the receiver while it shoots off the commands.