Peter's Blog

My XFX GX5200 graphics card came and I fitted it in my MythTV box. Ok a GX5200 is an old card but it had to be AGP with DVI and I found nothing more recent that would suit. It cured my playback problems and worked fine with my 42PFP5532D.

Now It's a PVR

Immaculate viewing of Tellytubbies. The box is that thing on the floor bottom left. I'm going to hide it behind the TV once the dust settles. I have MythTV doing the following:

• PVR
• Photo Gallery
• DVD Player/Ripper/Burner

it can do more but I haven't set that up yet. Critiques:

PVR

my reception sometimes gets compression artifact noise but I haven't pinned this down to TV reception or cpu loading or both. It is bad on 'Dave' channel but then I record 'Top Gear' and 'Dragons Den' all the time on that channel. It was bad while rsyncing 10g of Wow over the network AND watching Dave so I need to take out some variables to trace this one. The CPU is 1700 gigahertz but if I recall correctly, AMD have their own definition of gigahertz. CBeebies and CITV (i.e. Dora the Explorer) are fine.

Photo Gallery

Copied 5G of family photo's on it. The folders are shown in random order and changing settings doesn't seem to have any effect. The photo's look great on a 42" plasma, like posters. Very sluggish if I open a 20M scan file.

DVD Player/Ripper/Burner

seem to have to tell the DVD burner two or three times what tracks you want on the DVD. When it is blowing the DVD it runs some python scripts that do the transcoding and blowing. During this time you sit and look at the command line output in a window, no progress bars and I didn't try to see if I could watch TV while it was going on. In tests it couldn't rip my legally purchased Gladiator CD due to IO errors but that one has always been problematic. It ripped a number of other DVD's but didn't compress the files so the four dvd's are occupying 90G of disk space.

It is interesting that Ubuntu doesn't come with any packages to crack DVD's but it does include a command line script that makes setting this up quite easy.

Now It's a PC

CTRL-ALT-Right on the logitech wireless keyboard (which, with mouse was a bargain for £20) switches me to a linux desktop and a terminal prompt. I need to wear my glasses to read anything. Here I have firefox etc so I'm all set up to cheat at TV quiz shows.

Now It's a Game Station

It took me a while to get Wow running smoothly (that's Maexyn). It turns out that it doesn't cooperate well with compiz so turning that off made it viable. I lose the shadows and stuff but I don't care when it comes to getting Wow running. The box isn't that beefy and Wow runs like it does on my laptop, not as nice as the desktop but usable although I need my glasses again in the auction house. Since the MythTV box is always on, a quick transmute is only a minute away. WoW runs at 1280x768 on the plasma, the same resolution asf the desktop so I can still CTRL-ALT-RIGHT to the desktop with no nasty clunky resolution changes. For a proper playing session I would still use the desktop.

Now It's a Server

My desktop pc running MythFrontend on the small screen to watch a Balamory from the myth backend (Balamory for demonstration purposes!) and Wow on the big screen (that's Maevyn), both on an Ubuntu desktop. Disabling compiz made both applications run MUCH better, for example they both had borders and could be moved around the screen! Disabling compiz doesn't seem to have cost me any functionality, just eye candy (no wobbly windows ). The server box doesn't have a DVD burner in it but I can use the burner in my desktop pc.

If anyone is wondering why I bothered with a MythTV box rather than some off-the-shelf appliance:

• the hardware upgrades for my old box cost me less than a Vista upgrade.
• no DRM
• automatic commercial skipping
• it is fundamentally a linux server box and hence is infinitely flexible. I can back up my web sites to it VERY cheaply, just by rsyncing through ssh tunnels. If my ADSL upload speed wasn't so poor it could host my web sites.

One thing missing is iTunes... come back DRM laden appliances, all is forgiven.

Ironically, something I have been recording is The Big Bang Theory. I think those guys would love my setup...