[ILUG] mythtv, debian, etc

[Keith Davey]

Hi,

I bought a Shuttle SN41G2, which now has an athlon 3000+, 1gb of ram and
a 120gb harddrive.

I got a Hauppauge PVR 350. Its a tight fit getting the card into the box
but it does go in. 

One thing is that the box is not completely silent. The system fan is
quiet enough, but there is a small fan on the NVidia chipset on the
motherboard and its a little noisy. Not that bad but I would like to do
better. I checked the specs of other motherboards with the same chipset
and they all seem to only have a heatsink on this chipset, so I am
looking at replacing the fan. So long as I stick on a big enough
heatsink it should be fine.

The good thing about the Hauppauge as well is that it has a decent
remote which works well with all the software I have tried.

For software, I made a 5 gb windows xp partition, 5gb for Fedora Core 1
and the rest in a video partition. I installed MythTV using apt-get
following the docs on mythtv.org. It was breeze and worked pretty
quickly.

However, I still tend to do most of my recording / playback under
Windows( I know, I know). The reason is that the quality of recordings
and playback is just way better. I think this is a driver problem but I
may be wrong. The NVidia TV out is way better quality under windows than
fedora. 

I am planning on switching the output under linux to the 350, I have
tested this and its quality is a lot better than the NVidia. The main
problem with this is that most apps will not write to the output of the
350 as it is an mpeg2 decoder so anything that doesn't write mpeg 2
can't access it. This means no mame for example.

This all said, I love the box. I have no video recorder anymore and the
system works great. I have found the main thing I am using it for is
actually DIVX playback. I did have dvds lying around the house, now I
have converted loads to DIVX and just store them on the box. 

I am planning on getting a second harddrive in there soon, probably a
200 or 300 gb. Those DIVX files burn up space.

Keith



On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 11:25, Donncha O Caoimh wrote:
> You can download a Knoppix based distro with mythtv installed. I found 
> it a while back..
> 
> http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/archives/p/89490771/more/1/c/1/Linux-My-Settop-Box-Easy-Linux-PVR
> 
> "This project looks promising. It's an attempt to make MythTV easier to 
> install by supplying it with Knoppix. AFAICT you install the backend on 
> your server and it's even possible to run the frontend from the Knoppix 
> CD on a different machine. Unfortunately the recommended hardware spec 
> is well beyond any of the machines I own. That said, I've downloaded the 
> ISO so I'll certainly give it a go!"
> 
> http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html
> 
> Donncha.
> 
> Brendan Kehoe wrote:
> > I'm going to try building up a MythTV box, and was wondering what sort of 
> > success any of you have had thus far.  I saw the notes from the beginning 
> > of the year, so I know it's something that's being hacked on.  I'll be 
> > hooking it up to the NTL digital cable box.
> > 
> > I'm curious about the choice of OS (Debian stable/unstable vs SuSE or
> > RedHat or KnoppixMyth, ...), and how any of you have come up with small
> > quiet boxes to do this.  No raging fans in the corner of the livingroom.
> > :)  For tuner card, Hauppauge PVR-250 vs 350 vs ... ?  Cheapest place for
> > it?  and on and on... heh.
> > 
> > Feel free to respond off the list and I'll summarize later what I've 
> > found/done.
> >  
> > B
> >