Pablo Averbuj

Myth-buster

Leigha went home for over a week which left me with a lot of time on my hands (although it didn’t feel like much). I had big plans for my time alone. I was going to set up asterisk, set up MythTV, work on a new website project. Alas it’s Sunday, fully 9 days since Leigha left and I only accomplished setting up MythTV. I used KnoppMyth for the installation, and most of the problems I had were hardware problems that weren’t KnoppMyth fault. Others were understanding what exactly MythTV was trying to do as it flailed about. In all I probably reinstalled MythTV about 4 times on the box before all was said and done.
The three hardware issues I had:

• Bad harddrive caused PAINFULLY slow install – much time wasted this way
• Crashing due to bizarre SMP/SCSI driver problem – I wasn’t using a SCSI drive so disabling the controller was good enough
• Swapping video cards – Once I was sure it would work, I had to install a video card that had TV-out

I spent a lot of time trying to get the TV display to look right (nvtv, nvidia-settings, X modelines, the works) with no satisfactory resolution. I finally gave up because I temporarily connected it to the bedroom TV, if all goes well, it would more likely live in the living room.

I’m fairly impressed with it. Somethings work better than others, that’s for sure, but so far the core functionality looks really good. I haven’t had much luck with the commercial detection/skipping. And I had some problems with guide data during the 3rd install. One feature I like (or will like, once the screen is large enough to read) is the NetFlix integration. That is really smart and not something I would have thought of on my own.

Here are some additional things I’d like try if MythTV works out:

• Adding additional tuners to MythTV
• Putting the backend in the basement, building thinner/quieter frontends for the viewing areas
• Taping over-the-air content in the hopes of ditching cable entirely
• iTunes integration like I have with TiVo