[H-GEN] mythtv

Michael Anthon michael at anthon.net
Mon Nov 28 04:29:42 EST 2005


> I intend to use mythtv built on knoppmyth
> http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html
>
> I am looking for any advice or stories in relation to mythtv
> especially hardware gotchas

In a word, it rocks !  I'm using a Twinhan DVB-T card, seems to work
well.  The tuning was a bit hard to get right initially as the autotuning
code doesn't seem to be complete for DVB.  I can probably feed you some more
details on exact settings (or a dump of my tables) if you need it.

Also there is a new(ish) community generated xml tv guide source for
Australia[1] at http://minnie.tuhs.org/tivo-bin/tvguide.pl and an XMLTV
grabber here http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~willu/xmltv/tv_grab_au_tuhs.html .
Once point worth noting is that to make the grabber work you MUST change
your account preferences on the site to use XML (took me a while to find
that was needed)

My setup is a little unusual in that I don't really have a frontend.  My
backend machine is a Celeron 466 with a 120G drive for the storage (and a
smaller drive for OS etc.) which is way way too slow for playing back
recordings and has no screen attached anyway.  The 466 uses about 10% CPU
while recording with the DVB card although more power would be useful for
the transcoding bit (takes about 4x real time).  I have another older
machine that I boot up every now and then to use as a frontend for marking
and trimming content before transcoding it but it's not fast enough to
playback recordings either.  I watch all my recordings on my windows box and
also burn some stuff for the kids to DVD [2].

All of my program recording setup I do via the web interface so apart from
the odd cutting and marking session I have little need for a frontend[3]

Anyway, I'm blathering, if you need more info, just ask.

Cheers,
Michael

[1] thanks to Robbie for pointing this out to me 8^)
[2] I recently bought a DVD player that also plays divx and mpeg2 for $55
which works a treat, although the data rate of the raw mpeg2 streams from
the DVB card seems to be a bit high for the poor thing so I generally encode
that stuff to divx.
[3] well, little enough that I can't justify a nice, shiny, new, quiet
frontend to go in our bedroom to SWMBO
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