Post-Windows 7 HTPC plans
Re: Post-Windows 7 HTPC plans
I may try a dual boot to LibreELEC to see if it solves my Kodi issues and doesn't introduce new Linux nonsense to sort out. It could solve both the frame rate playback issue and do surround sound output.
Re: Post-Windows 7 HTPC plans
Shrank the partition using gparted from a Mint USB boot drive and cut the partition in half. I am preparing to try LibreELEC and I assume 120GB is enough for each of them.
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Re: Post-Windows 7 HTPC plans
Neat
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Re: Post-Windows 7 HTPC plans
Got my 3 pack of USB drives.
Made a LibreELEC boot drive. It's funny. For Mint, the user friendly distro, I had to use Rufus to write the ISO to the flash drive. With LibreELEC, they have a Windows or Mac OS wizard that downloads AND writes the ISO to the flash drive. So I did that and it worked fine. I selected Legacy Generic because I think the developers consider legacy hardware anything older than 7-8 years or something? There are other differences that I don't understand having to do with support for HDR video. The HTPC has DVD rips....enough said.
So yeah the plan was to "simply" install LibreELEC on the new blank area of my SSD. Turns out that's not a thing that their installer can do. It just wants to wipe the entire drive. Damnit. EDIT: It occurred to me in the shower that I MAY be able to install LibreELEC fresh and then install Mint afterwards and the Mint installer may well handle dual boot. But, why would I do that if LibreELEC is working? I wouldn't. Just documenting the option I guess. My choices are....blow away Mint, buy ANOTHER SSD (or use one of the ones that is now floating around my house - the old Win 7MC Intel drive for this HTPC, or the old Win 10 drive for my Vaio), or try the live boot environment in the meantime. I chose the latter.
Once you select what you want to do in the boot loader (default is live boot), it just boots into LibreELEC which turns out is just Kodi. Everything is handled through Kodi as an add-on. This really is made for like an ARM device connected to your NAS or file server for media. But my ISO was X86_64 so it works on this old hardware, too.
Spoilers: I was able to make everything work, with a caveat. The caveat is I think I am having issues with the HTPC case USB hub for the front USB ports. They work but certain combinations of things plugged in seem to cause issues. I also couldn't quite get my USB keyboard working, though the OS recognized the BT dongle, and the software saw the keyboard. I think this happened in Mint and I just rebooted to fix it? Not worried about that.
I tried some media. Critically, I wanted to see if A) I had surround output finally, and B) what kind of framerate/CPU utilization I had. Great news: everything is good. CPU utilization is like 10-25% while playing movies and the framerate is no problem. I even was able to set it to drive the HDMI output to match the movie frame rate. So for Up, that's 24 Hz. The TV played along and let me select 60 (with some motion smoothing), 48 (with flicker but kind of cool I guess?) or 96Hz which is what was the best experience.
Kodi seems snappier with less system overhead. I can't exit to a desktop but I think there is a browser add-on, and probably MANY other add-ons. Even basic OS stuff is handled via an add-on (like network config). Pretty neat and I guess this is really what this old HTPC needs for an OS. It's only a core 2 duo and 4GB ram. I could add a core 2 quad and more RAM but honestly it is totally not necessary. What's also funny is because of how integrated and optimized this distro is for HTPC use, I could just about just use this HTPC off of the live boot environment. So the 250GB SSD seems like orders of magnitude of overkill. That's ok I guess. It was very cheap. What does seem necessary is a better USB controller. So I realized my one PCI Express x1 slot is taken up by a now-unused TV tuner. Actually I think Kodi does have a PVR capability but I did switch to Fire TV Recast or whatever. It would be fun to try but I need this slot for a USB card. I just bought another one of what I previously bought for my Dell desktop which seems to work fine, and has Linux support.
https://www.amazon.com/YEELIYA-PCI-7-Po ... 164&sr=8-3
This should allow me to plug in everything I need which is:
- Ethernet to USB dongle, with hopefully hardware based control that doesn't kill my CPU on large transfers
- Mouse
- BT dongle
- IR receiver
With 5 type A ports, I should have one empty slot, plus I have freed up slots from the integrated controller for a USB flash drive as a boot device as I doubt I could boot from one plugged into this new card (but maybe?). Plus it has 2 x USB C so I have room to expand into modern stuff if necessary.
At this point I am thinking I should just let it blow away Mint. I will have to SSH in for system maintenance but I don't think this will be required unless I really want to tweak things or something breaks or whatever.
So yeah the plan was to "simply" install LibreELEC on the new blank area of my SSD. Turns out that's not a thing that their installer can do. It just wants to wipe the entire drive. Damnit. EDIT: It occurred to me in the shower that I MAY be able to install LibreELEC fresh and then install Mint afterwards and the Mint installer may well handle dual boot. But, why would I do that if LibreELEC is working? I wouldn't. Just documenting the option I guess. My choices are....blow away Mint, buy ANOTHER SSD (or use one of the ones that is now floating around my house - the old Win 7MC Intel drive for this HTPC, or the old Win 10 drive for my Vaio), or try the live boot environment in the meantime. I chose the latter.
Once you select what you want to do in the boot loader (default is live boot), it just boots into LibreELEC which turns out is just Kodi. Everything is handled through Kodi as an add-on. This really is made for like an ARM device connected to your NAS or file server for media. But my ISO was X86_64 so it works on this old hardware, too.
Spoilers: I was able to make everything work, with a caveat. The caveat is I think I am having issues with the HTPC case USB hub for the front USB ports. They work but certain combinations of things plugged in seem to cause issues. I also couldn't quite get my USB keyboard working, though the OS recognized the BT dongle, and the software saw the keyboard. I think this happened in Mint and I just rebooted to fix it? Not worried about that.
I tried some media. Critically, I wanted to see if A) I had surround output finally, and B) what kind of framerate/CPU utilization I had. Great news: everything is good. CPU utilization is like 10-25% while playing movies and the framerate is no problem. I even was able to set it to drive the HDMI output to match the movie frame rate. So for Up, that's 24 Hz. The TV played along and let me select 60 (with some motion smoothing), 48 (with flicker but kind of cool I guess?) or 96Hz which is what was the best experience.
Kodi seems snappier with less system overhead. I can't exit to a desktop but I think there is a browser add-on, and probably MANY other add-ons. Even basic OS stuff is handled via an add-on (like network config). Pretty neat and I guess this is really what this old HTPC needs for an OS. It's only a core 2 duo and 4GB ram. I could add a core 2 quad and more RAM but honestly it is totally not necessary. What's also funny is because of how integrated and optimized this distro is for HTPC use, I could just about just use this HTPC off of the live boot environment. So the 250GB SSD seems like orders of magnitude of overkill. That's ok I guess. It was very cheap. What does seem necessary is a better USB controller. So I realized my one PCI Express x1 slot is taken up by a now-unused TV tuner. Actually I think Kodi does have a PVR capability but I did switch to Fire TV Recast or whatever. It would be fun to try but I need this slot for a USB card. I just bought another one of what I previously bought for my Dell desktop which seems to work fine, and has Linux support.
https://www.amazon.com/YEELIYA-PCI-7-Po ... 164&sr=8-3
This should allow me to plug in everything I need which is:
- Ethernet to USB dongle, with hopefully hardware based control that doesn't kill my CPU on large transfers
- Mouse
- BT dongle
- IR receiver
With 5 type A ports, I should have one empty slot, plus I have freed up slots from the integrated controller for a USB flash drive as a boot device as I doubt I could boot from one plugged into this new card (but maybe?). Plus it has 2 x USB C so I have room to expand into modern stuff if necessary.
At this point I am thinking I should just let it blow away Mint. I will have to SSH in for system maintenance but I don't think this will be required unless I really want to tweak things or something breaks or whatever.
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Re: Post-Windows 7 HTPC plans
As for generic vs legacy generic LibeELEC builds:
I didn't look super closely but it also sounds nVidia GPUs may be poorly supported in general. Good news: this system uses an old ATI Radeon HD4670 and it works just fine.
Apparently the non-legacy builds write directly to the framebuffer and skip the display server entirely, which I guess is required for HDR and is probably even more efficient on stuff like a Raspberry Pi anyway.The difference between "Generic" and "Generic-legacy" is the graphics stack. Generic uses GBM, so there is no display server or manager. Kodi is controlling what gets fed to your screen itself. At present, it's needed to get HDR working, and has the benefit of using the same video pipeline as the ARM devices LE supports, so fewer differences in our images.
Generic-legacy is using X11 with a manager, and permits something like running a browser too.
In terms of legacy hardware with what you quoted, that doesn't apply to the difference in Generic / Generic-legacy. With the exception of nVidia GPUs, Generic and Generic-legacy are expected to support the same hardware. Since this is new code, GBM may expose some issues though.
I didn't look super closely but it also sounds nVidia GPUs may be poorly supported in general. Good news: this system uses an old ATI Radeon HD4670 and it works just fine.
As far as users with old NVIDIA GPUs are concerned, Legacy Generic is very unlikely to work since it uses Xorg+a specific version of the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Regular Generic has a higher chance of success in this case since, as stated in other comments, it uses GBM and it does NOT include the proprietary drivers, eventually letting inbuilt Nouveau module drive the NVIDIA GPU.
What I said here concerns any device with NVIDIA GPUs not supported by driver version 360.xx(?), legacy or not, including laptops with NVIDIA Optimus.
Source: My own experimentation with LE12 on Acer Aspire 5742G, which is now running the Generic image flawlessly.
Re: Post-Windows 7 HTPC plans
Got my PCIe USB card installed and then permanently installed LibreELEC. It was very fast to install.
Had a hard time getting my bluetooth keyboard remote working but eventually it did. Also had a hard time with the IR remote. It would work if I held the remote like 1 inch from the receiver (it has fresh batteries). It seemed like I pressed the PC power button on the remote and it started working? Occasionally it would stop. I wish I knew if it was my remote, receiver or the system but it seemed to settle down as I played with Kodi more.
Installed the Chrome browser add on which worked fine.
My bluetooth keyboard remote doesn't work when the BT dongle is installed in the back of the HTPC. I had to move it to the front. I don't like that because I have to leave the port access door open. I have another BT 5.0 adapter that I can try. Failing that I can get a USB hub and keep that on the top of the HTPC and plug the BT dongle into that so it is facing forward.
I think everything is technically working at this point to have replaced 7MC. Ended up having (or choosing) to buy:
- 250GB SSD. I could have just blown away 7MC but I wasn't close to confident.
- USB to ethernet adapter because of a bad Linux NIC driver.
- PCIe USB card. Adding the USB to ethernet adapter ran me out of USB ports (2 in the back, 2 in the front - hey, it was 2009). EDIT: oh god, I'm blind. I noticed in one of the shots above that the back of the machine actually has 4 USB ports on the MB riser, plus the 2 on the front using an internal USB hub. Sigh. I should check CPU utilization during a speed test to see if the card at least takes the load off the CPU. If so then it was still a win.
- Technically the 3 pack of USB flash drives so I could handle more than one OS at a time without blowing away my Mint flash drive.
Everything was cheap so it's fine. Aside from making sure there are no weird bugs (like the IR remote situation), the other issue that I hope to resolve is the USB receiver still gets powered down on system standby so I cannot power it back on with the IR remote like I could on Windows 7. I was not able to get this working in Mint, either. So you'd have to hit the power button on the HTPC before a media session.
Actually maybe I'll try a different USB port for the IR receiver. It's possible I moved it from where it was in 7MC and perhaps only two can handle wake from sleep? Seems like it's the OS's job to ensure that the device doesn't go to sleep so it can receive the wake up command from the remote.
Had a hard time getting my bluetooth keyboard remote working but eventually it did. Also had a hard time with the IR remote. It would work if I held the remote like 1 inch from the receiver (it has fresh batteries). It seemed like I pressed the PC power button on the remote and it started working? Occasionally it would stop. I wish I knew if it was my remote, receiver or the system but it seemed to settle down as I played with Kodi more.
Installed the Chrome browser add on which worked fine.
My bluetooth keyboard remote doesn't work when the BT dongle is installed in the back of the HTPC. I had to move it to the front. I don't like that because I have to leave the port access door open. I have another BT 5.0 adapter that I can try. Failing that I can get a USB hub and keep that on the top of the HTPC and plug the BT dongle into that so it is facing forward.
I think everything is technically working at this point to have replaced 7MC. Ended up having (or choosing) to buy:
- 250GB SSD. I could have just blown away 7MC but I wasn't close to confident.
- USB to ethernet adapter because of a bad Linux NIC driver.
- PCIe USB card. Adding the USB to ethernet adapter ran me out of USB ports (2 in the back, 2 in the front - hey, it was 2009). EDIT: oh god, I'm blind. I noticed in one of the shots above that the back of the machine actually has 4 USB ports on the MB riser, plus the 2 on the front using an internal USB hub. Sigh. I should check CPU utilization during a speed test to see if the card at least takes the load off the CPU. If so then it was still a win.
- Technically the 3 pack of USB flash drives so I could handle more than one OS at a time without blowing away my Mint flash drive.
Everything was cheap so it's fine. Aside from making sure there are no weird bugs (like the IR remote situation), the other issue that I hope to resolve is the USB receiver still gets powered down on system standby so I cannot power it back on with the IR remote like I could on Windows 7. I was not able to get this working in Mint, either. So you'd have to hit the power button on the HTPC before a media session.
Actually maybe I'll try a different USB port for the IR receiver. It's possible I moved it from where it was in 7MC and perhaps only two can handle wake from sleep? Seems like it's the OS's job to ensure that the device doesn't go to sleep so it can receive the wake up command from the remote.
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Re: Post-Windows 7 HTPC plans
Well what do you know. Switched the IR receiver to these other USB ports that I didn't see and it works! I can wake it from sleep with the remote just like 7MC. I must have had the receiver plugged into one of these and when I took everything apart I moved stuff around or something.kevm14 wrote: ↑Fri May 09, 2025 4:27 am Everything was cheap so it's fine. Aside from making sure there are no weird bugs (like the IR remote situation), the other issue that I hope to resolve is the USB receiver still gets powered down on system standby so I cannot power it back on with the IR remote like I could on Windows 7. I was not able to get this working in Mint, either. So you'd have to hit the power button on the HTPC before a media session.
Actually maybe I'll try a different USB port for the IR receiver. It's possible I moved it from where it was in 7MC and perhaps only two can handle wake from sleep? Seems like it's the OS's job to ensure that the device doesn't go to sleep so it can receive the wake up command from the remote.
Watched The Matrix on it last night. It would get into a funky state where the playback framerate became very choppy after a pause. But when I pressed "o" on the keyboard to check, it was rendering 24 fps just fine. A series of pausing and playing seemed to fix it. I can look into this I guess.
https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/28722 ... ter-pause/
https://wiki.libreelec.tv/configuration/4k-hdr
Interesting. I set mine to Always. I will try on start/stop and see if that fixes it.Adjust Refresh
Kodi can either upscale media to match the desktop resolution and refresh rate, or switch to a resolution and rate that exactly or better matches the media. Switching to match the rate can eliminate or minimise the need for Kodi to make corrections (to keep things in-sync) by adding or dropping frames. Adding frames to the stream is generally harmless and rarely causes noticeable artefacts, but dropping frames causes skips, glitches and audio pops.
Kodi has three "Adjust Refresh" settings:
Off (scale media to the desktop resolution/rate)
On start/stop (change resolution/rate when playback starts and stops)
Always (change on start/stop and during playback if the media changes resolution/rate)
Recommendation: Set the Adjust Refresh setting to "On Start/Stop"
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Re: Post-Windows 7 HTPC plans
That didn't fix it. I'll continue looking for a solution. This occurred during The Matrix. I'll check other movies.
Onto Bluetooth. I was using this one but reception was terrible when plugged into the back of the machine.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08DFBNG7F?re ... tle_1&th=1
So I also had this one laying around and tried it. It was cheaper actually.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DMP6T22?re ... in_title_3
Anyway this one has reception even when plugged into the back. Score! So now my USB IR receiver and TP Link BT dongle are plugged into a built-in USB port and everything else is on the PCIe USB 3.0 card.
Also set up an SSH shortcut using windows powershell on my laptop. Works for remote admin purposes. Samba also works. Ran another speed test and I am saturating my ISP now. So that's definitely solved. Set up Bing wallpapers as the screensaver. Adds a professional feel to this setup. Booting quickly and directly into Kodi does the same.
Onto Bluetooth. I was using this one but reception was terrible when plugged into the back of the machine.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08DFBNG7F?re ... tle_1&th=1
So I also had this one laying around and tried it. It was cheaper actually.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DMP6T22?re ... in_title_3
Anyway this one has reception even when plugged into the back. Score! So now my USB IR receiver and TP Link BT dongle are plugged into a built-in USB port and everything else is on the PCIe USB 3.0 card.
Also set up an SSH shortcut using windows powershell on my laptop. Works for remote admin purposes. Samba also works. Ran another speed test and I am saturating my ISP now. So that's definitely solved. Set up Bing wallpapers as the screensaver. Adds a professional feel to this setup. Booting quickly and directly into Kodi does the same.
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