MythTV Lives July 21, 2008
Posted by a1291762 in : mythtv , add a commentSo a little while ago, I did some “computer person” work for my family. One of their machines died (it had been unstable for a while) and they got a new one so I took away the old one. My cousin got a laptop to replace their desktop machine and I got that too.
Despite my earlier optimism at my previous configuration it was never going to work out because it was still too loud and some bits (like the video card) remained unproven. I don’t think I ever got that box displaying TV.
So now I had 3 machines to pick the best bits from. Both of the newer ones used DDR RAM instead of the PC133 the older machine used. One of the new machines was a Celeron 2.2Ghz. The other was an Athlon XP 2100. I guess you’d call them comparable. I went straight for the Athlon system though because the Celeron was the unstable one. It was a nicer system anyway, with a quiet CPU fan (must be a retail or third party fan/cooler) and S/PDIF output. I grabbed the power supply from the Celeron system since it was the quietest by a significant margin. I’ve got a 20GB Seagate disk to boot the system from and a 300GB Maxtor for my recordings. Video comes from a NVidia 6200 that was purchased for another machine but it got swapped around and ended up being surplus (so I got it). The card can use the current NVidia driver so everything just works, which is awesome.
I put the machine next to the TV and it is actually quiet enough that it’s not going to bother me. That’s a big step up from my previous box. I got everything plugged in and started tweaking stuff. I started with a LCD and keyboard plugged into the box but quickly got it to use the TV and my laptop’s keyboard (via Synergy). I started with Ubuntu 8.04 then found out about Mythbuntu. Luckily it was easy enough to get that installed on a regular Ubuntu and to remove the GNOME desktop afterwards. That leaves me with an Ubuntu-based system that’s a little more tuned to my purpose. I spent quite a while tweaking the TV output so that MythTV can fill my TV screen. Mythbuntu lets you setup a VNC server which was handy because it meant I didn’t have to strain to see small text or stuff the overscan obliterated.
The remote was almost a pain until I found this page. Right at the end of the comments someone notes that the format of hardware.conf has changed. With that taken care of the remote works fine.
I’m using SVideo output for now. I’m reading about how the 6200 can do composite output but I’m not sure how to get this to my TV. I’ve got a VGA to Composite converter (that relies on the video card doing the work) which might work but I haven’t tried it yet. I haven’t plugged the S/PDIF into the AMP yet either but I do have stereo output working.
Now for the tricky part… the tuners.
I have 3 tuners that are all the same. See here for the details. I realised that I haven’t actually had MythTV running live TV since that post. I certainly never got more than 1 card going at once. This time it was supposed to be good but it wasn’t. It seems these cards have a reputation for being badly shielded so the fact that I’ve got all 3 in adjacent PCI slots is definitely not a good thing. There was also the issue of aerial splitting but I’ve now got a powered splitter so that shouldn’t be a problem. When I got MythTV to scan for channels it only found SBS and Nine. Of those, I could only watch SBS (it wouldn’t signal lock to Nine). So I have watched live TV on this box but it’s a little underwhelming at the moment.
I’m stuck till next weekend (Bree likes to watch TV in the evenings) but I’ve got some ideas to try. I’ll test a single card in the machine. I’ll also test that the signal path isn’t being screwed up along the way. If I can get one card to work fine then I’ll try the tuner cards in every other PCI slot. If it’s a shielding issue I guess I’ll put some aluminium foil around them (or perhaps I’ll try putting some other PCI cards in the slots between them first).
A note on comments July 2, 2008
Posted by a1291762 in : site , add a commentComments on some pages (most notably, the AttnGrab page) are not for general use so any attempt to leave a comment on these pages will result in your comment no being seen. I’ll put a note on the AttnGrab page… I’m not sure if it’s possible to hide the leave a comment link though. I’ll have to look at it (possibly some kind of CSS trick will work).
I’ve also got some comments that want replies but there’s no email address supplied to reply to. I’ve come up with a solution for these too… I’ll publish Q&A (edited for brevity and clarity) as comments on my Contact Me page. If you’ve left me a note but didn’t get a reply, try looking at that page.