mythtv

I picked up the pcHDTV card HD-5500 (specifically designed for Linux) and installed it tonight.

My goal was to use my MythTV box to record the basic digital and basic HD content.

I've been considering a switch to DirecTV. Suddenlink, my local cable provider doesn't offer ANY of the major four networks in high definition. Initially when I signed up, I was told that I would get NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX all in HD.Low and behold, it ain't so. In fact, without paying extra for HBO or CINIMAX, I only get something like 7 HD channels, and one is in Spanish.

So, I checked with DirecTV who claims to have over 100 HD stations by the end of the year.

Wow, I can get 9 HD channels from DirecTV, and get this - none include ABC, NBC, CBS or FOX. Thanks.

Idea two: try to get MythTV to record digital cable / HD. In researching capture cards for MythTV I stumbled across this little gem from PcHDTV.

And, it's cheaper than what I paid for my analog Hauppauge capture card. I might just have to try that out!

It never fails. You get used to something one way and it changes.

Today was the day of changes. First my brother calls, informing me that they can't get to the website. Turns out, my web host had changed the server's IP address without bothering to tell me. I submitted an online support ticket and got the following response:

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Hello,

This is because we are having urgent changing of our IP addresses and that cause the problem. After the dns changes are finished your site will be back online. The new ip address for your server is 206.212.247.132. Please excuse us for the inconvenience.

Best Regards,
Support Team
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Ever wanted a good wireless print server? What about a media server?

How about you kill two birds with one stone with this cool gadget:The wireless Squeezebox from SlimDevices acts as a wireless bridge. You could easily attach a networked printer to this little gadget, get your streaming music from the Internet and kill two birds with one stone.

It uses wireless for it's primary interface, and provides a network jack for you to connect your printer, media server or what have you.

I love mine. I have my MythTV media server attached to it, and it uses a wireless link to connect to my modem / router. I run the Slimserver software on the MythTV box and it provides my MP3 collection and streaming stations to the Squeezebox. This keeps me from running CAT-5 all the way to the TV. It would work great for a networked printer as well to turn it wireless.

The system I run Myth on is not a powerhouse but it's not a turtle either. With an AMD 2000+ and 768 MB of RAM, it's probably slower than your desktop but it suffices for video recording and playback quite well.

Unfortunately after reinstalling Myth I had some audio sync issues and staccato video. I finally realized what the problem was.I had compiled MythTV with every video playback method known to man, thinking this would give me the most options. The downside is that certain things like OpenGL sync are always on when compiled in.

I ended up recompiling MythTV and only enabled XvMC playback support while disabling all other video modes. Playback is fast and smooth now, and the quality is high. I'm recording at 720x480 at a minimum of 4800 Kbps. It's generating around 1.5 GB of data for every hour recorded.

Suddenlink installed the HDTV Cable box today. Before I get to that, I'll cover the remote control setup for my MythTV:

So the saga continues into the early morning...

Everything compiled rather easily, but to get the plugins to all work the way I wanted I had to add the following packages using apt-get:
libvisual-0.4-dev
libvisual-0.4
libmad0
libmad0-dev
libid3tag0-dev
libcdaudio-dev
libcdparanoia0-dev
libflac-dev
fftw3-dev
libexif-dev
libfaac-dev
libfaad2-0
libfaad2-dev
kdelibs4-dev

Some of this would likely have been installed had I used 'apt-get build-dep mythtv-plugins' but I didn't think that far ahead.

I also had to download and compile taglib.

MythTV wouldn't start the setup process until I added libqt3-mt-sql.

After that, I was able to setup my zap2it subscription inside MythTV (see the MythTV HOWTO for details) so it will download the TV listings for me.

I've been running MythTV for years. Typically I just let it do it's thing, and I don't often update the box.

Lately I've had issues with the DVD info downloader and the weather modules. I also haven't had cable in a few months for various reasons and just ordered a digital HD package to be installed this weekend.

All seemed like a good opportunity to start the machine from scratch.