It’s official. I’m building a MythTV box. I snapped up a bargain price on a TV capture card (on eBay) so I now have (or will, once the card arrives) all the parts I need.
I doubt it’ll be hard to convince Bree that we should just spend the $500 it’ll take to turn it into a replacement for all our current TV stuff once I get it up and running.
Update 18 April 2007
Ugh.
I’ve been trying to put together the box. It had everything in it except for the Radeon (which needs to be reflashed anyway). I removed some useless PCI cards to make way for the tuners. Booted it and it was all good.
So then I realised that to flash my Radeon I’d need a PCI video card. Who has one of those anymore! Luckily, I had a Matrox Millenium card that I bought years ago to run an old SyncOnGreen monitor, originally used by seven before I made it work headless. I got it for almost nothing at a clearance auction and it was actually quite impressive compared to what I had available at the time. It was a 21″ tube that could handle 1280×1024. It’s biggest downfall? SyncOnGreen. Seven was designed to drive that particular monitor so it could handle it without a problem but PC video cards aren’t designed to run SyncOnGreen monitors. However, the Matrox Millenium was capable of driving a SyncOnGreen monitor. The driver didn’t expose this but there was a buffer overflow you could exploit somewhere to cause the support to get turned on. Rather convoluted and totally useless when not running Windows but it let me use a big monitor with good resolution.
So one of the things that the Matrox Millenium could do is dual card stuff. However, it was doing this back before PCs were designed to handle more than one video card at a time so you had to disable the VGA part of the second card with a dip switch. I _finally_ remembered that after spending ages trying to get the damn machine to boot with the Millenium as the primary card!
Update 19 April 2007
Well… that was quick. And uneventful. I went to copy files to the floppy disk that had been sitting in the machine only to realise that it was the same floppy disk I’d used when I first flashed the card! I booted from it, flashed the PAL 250/250 bios and it was all over in a matter of seconds. Time to get KnoppMyth going I think…
Update 19 April 2007
While I was burning the KnoppMyth CD I booted the Linux that happened to be on my machine. It was CenOS 4. It identified my video card as a Radeon 8500 LE (it’s an OEM one but that’s the same as the LE) and got X running without any hassles. Nice!
I’m currently installing KnoppMyth over the CentOS partition (there’s a Windows 98 partition too but it’s got some old games I still want to play, not to mention that it’s the only system that can update my PVR). The boot messages indicate that the on-board audio works (I was using a PCI card before but I need the slots). The boot messages also indicated that the card was detected (again, as a Radeon 8500 LE). I’ve got a cable to connect it to the TV (single cable, 5 pins). Before too long I really will be hanging out for the tuner card to make the box do useful things. I put the DVD RAM drive from the Mac into the Myth box, replacing the old CD drive it had (that can’t even read CD-RW). At some point I’ll probably want to put a DVD burner in there for sending recorded shows to other people. Transfer to tape will still be possible but it’s tedious. Of course, the only DVD burner I have right now is the one in my MacBook Pro.
