hdmi in mintbox

[christia]

hi, i am about to purchase a mintbox, but have the following two questions i hope i can get answers to here (the fit-pc sales department directed me here). sorry if should have been posted in the linux on fitpc forum, not sure if it is hardware or software question

1)

the linux mint team wrote this somewhere - as hdmi sound is specifically mentioned for the mintbox pro, and not for the mintbox basic, i wondered if it means that there is no sound via HDMI on the mintbox basic? (if so, how does one get sound when playing video from mintbox on ones television?) any other known issues with videoplayback via HDMI for either of the machines?

quote:
"On the mintBox Pro, glxgears runs at 60FPS using the default Gallium renderer and 1000FPS using the ATI drivers. HD video playback is more fluid and sound output via HDMI is enabled once the ATI drivers are installed.
On the mintBox Basic, glxgears runs at 60FPS using the default Gallium renderer and 800FPS using the ATI drivers."
end quote

2)

i think with Mint13, one does no longer need to install the ATI drivers - is this confirmed? initially i think one had to install these drivers to get it to play via HDMI, but as i will only use it via HDMI, i need it to work out-of-the-box for HDMI

thank you
christian

[gabrielh]

Hello Christian

Thank you for your interest in Fit-PC3.

1. All the Fit-PC3 version have an HDMI sound output
2. If you purchase a FIT-PC3 with a preinstalled Linux Mint 13, than you have all the drivers installed on board. Installing all the provided drivers advised, in the custom LM13 installation case.

[christia]

Thank you for your reply.

Any noticeable quality difference in video playback between the Mintbox Basic and Pro (ie effectively between the fit-pc3 basic and pro as well)? As that is what I will mainly be using it for, that is what is most important to me.

Edit: i think i will just go ahead and buy the mintbox basic. quality likely a big jump above my current machine (a 2008 sony vaio laptop) anyway, and price difference of 170 USD doesn't justify the difference (would buy Pro if it came to 475ish area i think)

[gabrielh]

If you are talking only about the quality of the video playback, then the only difference is in the HDMI and the DP port.

Please refer to http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc/fit-pc3-info/#techinfo for additional info

[vtailor]

I downloaded and installed the latest 64-bit Mint for my fit-pc3 basic, and two pieces of information came up:

(1) If you down'oad vainfo, this works with the generic radeon drivers to integrate with the vdpau acceleration system and provide better rendering speed.

(2) A search of the Mint forums from google yields the suggestion that the radeon.ko kernel module has something to do with HDMI sound. In other words, on kernels where radeon.ko even works, you can try

/sbin/modprobe radeon tv=1 audio=1

in order to activate HDMI sound. Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to work in the latest Mint, and evidence of their giving up on getting HDMI audio in Linux is the presence of a volume control app that only features analog output.

Moral of the story: Even the boys in Ireland believe that the fit--pc3 is a great little box, when used with analog speakers and a DVI-D or HDMI monitor.

[kwoby]

Please read my posting :
http://www.fit-pc.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 4&start=10

as Mint is a derivate of Ubuntu, the behaviour should be the same.

Greets
kwoby

[vtailor]

I did some preliminary tests on my fit-pc3 pro, and it is about as fast as the intense-pc basic. I mean it gets a peacekeeper benchmark score of around 1100+ in RIPLinuX, which is slightly less than the basic intense-pc. It even has a few of the idiosyncrasies of the intense-pc in running difficult streaming flash tests. What a sensational sound chip.

Do you think that makes Intel mad?