Like we need another MythTV-Related post. I guess its now so important to Eric & I we have to blog on it though!
Anyway, I’ve had my MythTV system up and running pretty nearly flawlessly for almost 2 months (which works out to 288 recordings in 259 hours and 14 minutes taking up 263 GB of disk space). My system specs are:
Backend
- Old AMD Athlon 1.666GHz
- 256MB Ram
- Slackware Linux 10.2
- 300GB SATA Hard Drive (to be upgraded to RAID soon)
- PVR-150MCE PCI Capture Card
- DirecTV Hughes Receiver connected via SVideo
- IR Blaster bundled with the PVR-150 to change channels
- MythTV SVN r9070 (Backend & MythWeb)
Living Room Frontend
- Used Softmodded X-Box running Xebian
- Microsoft DVD Remote Control
- MythTV SVN r9070 (Frontend with MythVideo, MythDVD, MythRecepie plugins)
The X-Box is a little slow in the user-interface, but otherwise seems to work flawlessly. It plays back SD MPEG2 and MPEG4 videos without any problems.
For my second Frontend, which is currently in the bedroom, I used the following System:
2nd Frontend
- Old HP Pavilian Motherboard acquired quite some time ago from Tyson
- 1GHz Intel Celeron
- 128MB RAM
- 10GB Hard Drive
- nVidia GeFORCE4 MX4000 64MB PCI With SVIDEO Out
- Cheap 10MBit PCI Network card I had laying around
- Slackware 10.2 and same version of MythTV
Got everything up and running quite easily! Here’s a quick list of “problems” I had for documentation (or laughing) purposes:
- Remembered that this POS doesn’t have an AGP Slot — I was going to use this for a frontend instead of buying an xbox when I remembered that this motherboard doesn’t have an AGP slot … that means I’d have to buy a new PCI video card… which I finally did.
- Power Supply Connector — Since I had used this power supply for several things except a computer, the green “Power-On” pin in the connector had become too large from sticking too many paper clips in it. Everytime I’d, say, open the CDROM drive to insert the Slackware boot disc, the drive would vibrate against the power supply, which would move the cable just enough to power off the system. Fixed by crimping it back to a tighter fit.
- Bad Hard drive — My 60GB Hard Drive I was planning on using won’t read past about 57% of the disk (where it died trying to format it). Ugh. Ended up using an older 10GB drive I had laying in the garage.
- Noise on TV Screen — Once everything was working and I moved it to the bedroom and hooked it up to the TV screen, I realized there was some “digital” noise interfering with the video! Its pretty faint and unnoticable when watching TV, but its very noticable during bootup on the black console screen.
- NO FREAKING AUDIO OUT CONNECTOR — I think i’m starting to realize why Tyson wanted to get rid of this stupid computer … the motherboard doesn’t have an audio output jack. Only three pins on the motherboard. …Time to go manufacture my own RCA cables…
- Loud volume — With the mixer set up to full volume, the audio got all distorted. Whats worse (and funny)? The audio was interfering with the video on my TV. I got little rippiling horizontal lines on the video. Whats worse yet? When I pressed “mute” on the TV (since it was loud an annoying), I could still hear the audio! I must have been overloading the TV’s audio circuits. I’m sure eric can explain better…
Once I “fixed” everything, its great! Now to try and get a remote control working for it…
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