Bloggin it up

The awe-inspiring mythTV

-- TECHNICAL TALK Ferda and Vero LOOK AWAY!! --

I am pretty proud of my new mythtv box, so let me talk it up a bit.

A large amount of my time the last few weeks was involved in setting up a new PVR at home.
I ended up deciding that my existing mythtv box use a new spine, and bought a new motherboard processor (64bit), and a whoppingly un-necessary 1G of RAM (dual channel, cool), oh and power supply.

I got a used video card off Trevor @ work, (used GeForce FX 5700LE)

I kept the existing
- 2 x 200G IDE WD HD's
- Hauppauge 350 TV card
- Random old cd-rom
- Random case and fans

If anyone has seen my setup at home, I don't do the simple ol', BEV PVR or Rogers Digital PVR. I setup a mythtv box, and it is no small feat.

A working mythtv box is best described as epic.
- A myriad of ways to find and record the show you want.
- The ability to record all your shows any way you want. (ex. "record Amazing Race, any time, any channel, priority 99")
- Super smart recording, No recording of the same mythbusters episode twice.
- Fairly easy to use (once it is setup properly) ex. click on TV, Watch recordings, Amazing Race7, then your preferred episode.
- PVR ability comes as second nature now, but it is one of the most important features. ex. pause, rewind, fast forward, slow motion
- Commercial flagging ie. I don't want to watch the commercials, I will press the skip button, and jump to the end
- Hardware MPEG2 encoding to disk, then re-encoded to MPEG4 to save space.
- Dynamically upgradable storage (via LVM) currently at over 400 hours of recording space @ MPEG4.
- Auto rolling shows (delete the oldest, to make way for the newest)
- Ability to move the recordings to any other media, and watch on another computer. ex. Ryan: "Hey Matt I missed Amazing race last night, can you put it on DVD for me, or toss it on an FTP server so I can download it?"
- It can connect to any TV provider, BEV, Rogers cable, Rogers digital cable, Star Choice, etc.. connecting to Rogers cable is a little easier than connecting to BEV though.
- The ability to setup mythtv clients on any PC that has access to the mythtv box (Evan can watch Desparate Housewives upstairs, while I watch The Wrong Coast (hilarious new show I have been watching lately) downstairs.
- Of course there are many other features that I have not mentioned.

The setup was enjoyably challenging. Everything I had problems with last time worked flawlessly this time (ie setting up the Hauppauge card, setting up the linux kernel with the right options), but playing around with a 64bit processor slowed me down quite a bit. This install was faster than my first install though mainly because I had a backup of all my original config files to use as templates.
I plan on eventually posting all my important config files somewhere, to let others on the net use them (if they can find them)

posted by Matt @ 12:56 PM