Saturday, February 13, 2010
I am using a EL1300G-02W computer as a HTPC using MythTv.
It would play back 720p HD video just fine with the original processor, but couldn’t quite commercial flag new recordings in real-time while also watching a live feed. [This wasn't a big issue, as I very rarely watch new recordings live.]
Even though it works [...]
Thursday, December 31, 2009
I recently checked out all of the music player visualizations for the MythMusic module (part of MythTV). They vary widely in CPU usage and visual appearance. I wanted the CPU to be at least 50% free to work on transcoding or commercial flagging in the background while music was playing, so I avoided the [...]
Monday, December 28, 2009
If you are getting ERROR: AtomicParsley type messages in your mythexport.log file, it may be because ffmpeg isn’t exporting the files correctly. One reason for this is that config’s in mythexport that have spaces in the name cause problems. The workaround reported here is to remove the old config, rename it into something that doesn’t [...]
Friday, December 25, 2009
Switching to an eMachines EL1300G computer drastically cut the running power consumption of my MythTV setup, to an average of 45 watts when idle. (The old computer used 141 watts when idle.)
This makes it practical to leave the computer on 24/7. I had set my old computer to shut itself down when not recording, [...]
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Executive Summary: The eMachines EL1300G-02w is a good choice for a low power home theater PC (HTPC) or media computer. Pros: Small form factor, low energy use, low noise with stock fans, DVD-DL R/W +/- optical drive, lots of media card readers. Cons: 160GB stock HD will need to be swapped out for [...]
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
To set up lircd with the hdhomerun to see a tivo series 2 remote control, you should first program the HDHomeRun to send UDP packets to your linux computer with a command such as the following:
hdhomerun_config set /ir/target “<lircd ip addr>:<port> store”
You can test that this is working by running:
irrecord -H udp -d 5000 [...]
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Xbox Media Center is no longer for just the XBox. It’s UI is slicker than MythTV’s Frontend for playing music, videos, and showing slideshows of pictures. (It’s weather applet is also much nicer…) If you have an existing Ubuntu 9.10 based system, the PPA:team-xbmc repository makes it dead easy to install xbmc on a [...]
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
MythBuntu (and Ubuntu I assume) don’t support the AutoIP standard.
(Auto IP is basically a way for devices to form ad-hoc networks…if you don’t have a static IP, and are not assigned a dynamic IP via a dhcp server, you try out a random address in the 169.254.x.x network (255.255.0.0 netmask) and as long as ARP [...]
Sunday, December 20, 2009
I was in the process of changing out my MythTV backend machine, and when configuring the new machine, I took a look on SiliconDust’s website for a firmware update for my HDHomeRun (HDTV Network tuner box). I hadn’t updated it since late 2008, and sure enough, they were five or six firmware versions farther along. [...]
My SiliconDust HD HomeRun has a relatively good HD tuner, but it’s not quite as good as the built in tuner on my TV at picking up stations that are extremely strong and have multi-path reception problems. Although the signal My MythTV box reception of Fox TV would intermittently cut out as the SNR would [...]