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Monthly Archives: February 2009

Cutting MythTv idle power in half using a smart surge protector

Monday, February 23, 2009

Although I’ve set my MythTV box to shutdown when not in use, we still have a constant power drain of 34 watts even when the system is turned off due to various peripherals and parasitic power drains.

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Waiting for a HD HomeRun before starting the MythTV backend

Saturday, February 14, 2009

My mythtv box uses a SiliconDust HDHomeRun external network based tuner. Every so often (1 out of 5 boots) the network subsystem does not get started up before the mythtv-backend daemon. This causes an error where the mythtv-backend does not find the tuner, so it can not record any shows.

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MythWelcome Menu / GUI slowness

Saturday, February 14, 2009

On my 0.21-release-fixes codebase, MythWelcome would pause for a long time (2-3 seconds) after I pressed the “MENU” key before making the menu pop up. This was because a call to “mythshutdown –status” was taking several seconds to return, and MythWelcome waited for the return value of that message before drawing the menu [...]

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Atlanta / Decatur Over the Air digital channels

Friday, February 6, 2009

2_1 – ABC
2_1 – RetroTV
5_1 – Fox
8_2 – GPB Kids
8_3 – GPB Know
11_1 – NBC
11_2 – NBC Plus (weather)
12_1 – GPB
17_1 – Peachtree TV
30_1 – PBS
34_2 – TeleFutura (Spanish)
36_1 – MyATL
43_1 – The CW
46_1 – CBS
48_0 – Univision (Spanish)
63_1 – TBN
63_2 – Church Channel
63_3 – JCTV
63_4 – Enalce
63_5 – Smile

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MythTV power conservation

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Our MythTV entertainment system uses a decent amount of electricity. While watching TV, the television, DVD/Amplifier and computer (plus misc other items) use 335 watts of power. However, as we only average an hour or two of TV a day, this isn’t as large as the continuous power draw from the system when it is [...]

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How much do our CF bulbs save?

Sunday, February 1, 2009

We recently replaced most of our incandescent bulbs with instant-on CF light-bulbs. I cheated by upgrading our light output (using 100 watt equivalent bulbs to replace 60 watt incandescent bulbs) but each bulb should still save 34 watts.
I loosely estimated our daily light usage (over weekdays and weekends) on the newly CF fixtures as [...]

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