I purchased my first large screen LCD TV a Sony Bravia 40 from my local TV retailer. Being impressed by the HD demo playing on the TVs on display I investigated further and was surprised to find that it was actually a PC with a DVD-ROM drive that was outputting the display.

I persuaded Jason the shop manager to let me investigate setup with a view to cloning it & he kindly loaned me the PC for inspection

The PC to my surprise is not very high spec & very basic:-

• Pentium 4 - 2.5GHz Processor
  
• 256MB DDR 400 PC3200 RAM
  
• GForce 5200 128meg DVI graphics
  
• DVD-ROM drive
  
• NO Hard Drive

The operating system is on the DVD disc which booted up into Linux and used MPlayer to play the movie files at 1080i resolution

The OS Slax is fast and beautiful Linux operating system which will fit onto a small (3.14") CD-ROM disc. It runs directly from the C D (or USB) without installing. The Live C D IS based on the Slackware Linux distribution and uses Unification File System (also known as unionfs), allowing read-only filesystem to behave as a writable one, saving all changes to memory.

I set about building a PC dedicated to playing the HD movie clips and used the Demo PC as a guide. The minimum specification was based on the demo and works with video only but has trouble with audio, so my PC specification is as follows:-

• Pentium 4 - 3.0GHz Processor
  
• 512MB DDR 400 PC3200 RAM
  
• ATI 256meg DVI graphics card
  
• DVD-R/RW burner
  
• On Board Sound

The Sony demo disc had drivers for the GForce graphics but I found it difficult to get better than 720p resolution with GForce 5200 graphics whereas I can easily get 1080i resolution with the ATI graphics so this is my preferred graphics.

My OS is based on the SLAX Standard Edition v 5.1.8.1. I found that there are no modifications needed to the OS file system just the change of background graphics and autorun the player & hide the desktop & mouse all of which is done by adding a module. (It can also be done by adding the files externally in the rootcopy folder which is easy for modification but a complex file structure.)
Adding the extras modules to the system is quite easily done by just placing a module into the modules directory this automatically loads & installs on startup without altering the original OS so any problems created by a module can easily be reversed by just removing the module

All that is needed for the autoplay C D/DVD:-

• SLAX Standard Edition v 5.1.8.1 ISO
  
• Graphics Card Drivers depending on your graphics card
  • Nvidia 9629 for Slax 5.1.8 & NVIDIA Display Driver xconf
    
  • ATI_Drivers_fglrx_3D_automatic 8_31_5
• Slax_Utilities 0.2 for creating a bootable self start disc
  
• Autoplay Module created by me
  autoplay_nvidia.mo for NVidia Graphics card systems
  
  • autoplay_ati.mo for NVidia graphics card systems
• HD movies of your choice A good source of HD Movie trailers is Apple

The Slax OS is so versatile it will run from almost any media: Hard Drive, C D/DVD-ROM. Flash Memory Cards, Flash media, or any bootable removable media.
The basic OS is about 200meg leaving plenty of space even on a C D for a small movie clip.

For my project I extracted the whole C D ISO unmodified to an empty FAT32 partition on my hard drive, this enabled me to boot up Slax from DOS ( I have a DOS boot option but you can easily boot from a DOS boot floppy disc). Add the appropriate graphics card driver module to the modules folder (at this stage leave out the autoplay module)
To start the OS I simply select the partition drive letter that has the Slax ISO content, I will call it X: and type the following:-

• X:
  
• C D BOOT
  
• C D DOS
  
• LINUX.BAT

This will start up the OS and bring up the login screen which you need to log in with
Login:- root
Password:- toor
The next command starts the OS
startx
Usually it will refuse to start because the graphics has not been configured so you need to type
xconf
Wait for it to configure then type:-
startx
This time it will start up with the GUI

If you have managed to get this far now is the time to check the movie playback. I found the best files to play are HD mpg files of 25Mbps bitrate but the player is capable of playing most video formats mpg, avi, mov
Add a directory to the root of your SLAX partition named videos and place your movie clips in this directory, open up the konsole and type:-

/usr/bin/mplayer -vo xv -dr -fs -monitoraspect 16:9 -loop 0 /boot/videos/*.*

This will open up the mplayer and loop play at full screen all the movie clips in the videos folder assuming you have a 16:9 TV display
Once this is proven you can then add the autoplay module, this is placed in the modules folder and will install & run on the next start up of Slax
The autoplay module changes the screen background to navy blue, removes the desktop icons, moves & hides the task bar, makes the mouse pointer invisible and autoplays the movie files, otherwise the OS still functions as normal but with great difficulty finding the mouse pointer ;)

Cheatcodes are used to bypass the login and when run from dos are added to the config file in the boot/dos folder just add this line to the end of the text

autoexec=xconf;nopcmcia;startx

Once the system is built up & working on the hard drive it can made into a DVD, transferred to some other removable media or just kept on the hard drive and played from there
Creating a bootable DVD is quite simple using the Slax Utilities two step disk creation to create a disc ISO of the final project (autoexec=xconf;nopcmcia;startx are added to the boot sequence when creating the ISO) which can then be burnt with any ISO supporting DVD burner application. I did find that the burning application included with Slax fell over when it came to burn DVDs so I preferred to use Imgburn which I find to be the most reliable.

I find that the MPlayer will playback a variety of HD Movie formats and tested so far are mpg, mov, ts. I found the player would not recognize mpeg extensions but played the file ok with the extension renamed to mpg. Any that it would not play I used TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress to convert the files to HD mpg format, this format I find to be the least demanding and playback is smooth.

So far I have only used the onboard audio but intend to investigate the use of Dolby 5.1 & DTS with an additional sound card

This player works very well and the autoplay function plays any movie or movie clip, It can be configured to play movies by selection and is versatile in the type of formats it will play.
It is a substitute for commercial HD DVD Players which are extremely rare in the UK

All the software used is freeware and readily available and the player is open to discussion in the BDDVDFORUM where I am sure further ideas & enhancements will be forthcoming