[TriLUG] mythtv ramblings and a questions about december mythtv presentation

[Corey Mutter]

Myrhillion wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have recently gotten interested in building a mythtv box.
> I checked my trilug messages and found there was a meeting in December 
> which featured mythtv.
> Drats, I've missed my opportunity.
>
> Does anyone know if the presentation is available online somewhere?
> I'd like to discuss what people have for hardware too.
>
> Here is the basic machine I'm considering.
>
> I'm considering recycling an athlon duron 800 with 512 mb ram.
> I'm thinking gentoo or a debian based distro like ubuntu for the OS.
> The machine by itself would be too slow so,  I'm going to buy a tv 
> card, probably a hauppage (sp?) wintv 250 or 350. Has anyone seen any 
> benefit of the 350 over the 250 in practice?    Any other tv tuners 
> people have been impressed with to use for this purpose?
> I'll be adding a larger hard drive, probably 200gb range.
> A wireless nic so I can save some of the shows I want to keep to a 
> larger file server and to grab the xmltv feed.
> This will also make it simple to keep downstairs with the stereo tv etc..
>
> Doug Taggart
>
>
I have one that's been going for maybe 1.5-2 years now. It's a 1.8GHz 
Celeron with 512 MB of RAM. It's running Debian unstable, as that's the 
developers' platform. Started out with a cheap WinTV Go card, but 
upgraded to the PVR-250 a year or so ago and didn't look back. (The 
cheap card is in a more-powerful machine that also does other things, as 
a "Tuner #2" backend). It was fun explaining to a friend for whom I was 
captuing some camcorder video that my video capture tool was "cat".

The video card is a GeForce440mumble with TV out, though the TV out 
doesn't quite fill the screen despite fiddling with the TVOverscan 
option in XF86Config-4. The machine so far has handled everything, but 
the UI gets slow if it's playing back and recording and trying to do 
something else in the background (like transcode).

I'm using the PVR-250's remote, no problems. The only problem I've had 
is that the PVR-250 will sometime end up recording with vertical "lines" 
in the output. This is a firmware bug - switching inputs fixes it, so I 
have cron switch inputs then switch back daily at oh-dark-thirty - no 
problem.

You'll want to run (s)ntpd - in the beginning, I learned the hard way 
that your machine needs to have a good idea of what time it is!

I thought about using wireless, but it'd have to be good wireless 
because you'll be throwing around files that are 2GB / hour. I broke 
down, drilled a hole in the floor and ran Ethernet to the machine room 
(but my wireless is only 802.11b).

I just added an ugly, but functional IR blaster to this to control my 
TWC cable box. MythTV 0.17 is smart enough to know about different 
channel lineups connected to different inputs on the same card. I took 
the analog channels out of the Video-In lineup because I get better 
reception through the PVR-250's tuner that through capturing the 
video-out of those channels from the cable box.

Corey