MythTV

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Boing! Back to the top!

I got the new mobo for the frontend. Cleared up ALL of my issues. Note to people considering building a PC... SCREW VIA.

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There she be! microATX nForce 2 board, integrated geForce card, the whole nine. It could use a hair more RAM though...

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Favorite part of the board. Integrated dual VGA out. The idea of putting an LCD screen on the front of the case sounds intriguing... and possible :)

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Tiny lil HTPC case.

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Tiny lil HTPC case in tiny lil cabinet.

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Myth.

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LOTR from my movie selection.

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Full DVD rips. Harsh on drive space, great on the TV :)
 
bumping this back up.

sabz, hows the picture quality from the tuner card? i bought the same card as you (the PVR 150) and on my 20.1" LCD monitor, the picture quality is pretty bad when watching full screen. if you are far away it doesnt look that bad, but close up you can see the image quality is less than par. and certainly looks worse than if it was on a regular tv. it looks like when you zoom in on a small picture. is that normal? is there anyway to fix that? maybe a better vid card? my monitor is currently running at 1600x1200 res.

and lastly, can mythTV work with windows? or is it solely a linux thing?
 
bumping this back up.

sabz, hows the picture quality from the tuner card? i bought the same card as you (the PVR 150) and on my 20.1" LCD monitor, the picture quality is pretty bad when watching full screen. if you are far away it doesnt look that bad, but close up you can see the image quality is less than par. and certainly looks worse than if it was on a regular tv. it looks like when you zoom in on a small picture. is that normal? is there anyway to fix that? maybe a better vid card? my monitor is currently running at 1600x1200 res.

and lastly, can mythTV work with windows? or is it solely a linux thing?

It's standard def TV with the Hauppauge 150's. When you watch it fullscreen on a display with a resolution above 480i, it's gonna look grainy... that's just how it's gonna be. Standard def TV looks kinda grainy running at 1280x720 (720p) because its enlarging the stream res. Think of taking a small jpg and blowing it up. Same effect. More than one pixel is used to display what would normally be a single pixel.

This is more a lack in standard def TV versus a videocard/system issue.

Myth is a Linux thing with very little Windows support.
 
Since this got TTT'd, I'll post an update or two.

I put a third tuner in the server. Bought it for the remote receiver, actually :) Needed an IR receiver for the living room so I could control everything with my universal remonster.

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It is the Universal Remonster! Got it from the FarGate, which is not to be confused with the movie and syndicated show of similar name!

I had a Snapstream Firefly remote for that system, but since it was RF, the remonster couldn't control it. No problem, the Firefly is going in the bedroom.

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Still setting up the frontend software, that's why it looks like... well, a laptop connected to a monitor. Picture's pretty and wall mount beats all.

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Small, but it's all I need in the bedroom.
 
so there isnt anything i could do to have better quality? why does it look better on your screen?
 
so there isnt anything i could do to have better quality? why does it look better on your screen?

Unfortunately your issue (and mine too) is due to the low resolution of standard def compared to computer resolutions. There isn't much we can do at that point. My screen looks better because it's a picture... they are more forgiving about flaws than human eyes.
 
gotcha, i wasnt sure if it actually looked as good as the picture showed.

so when the output of the front end goes to an actual TV monitor, does it look better? like just as good as if you had the coax hooked up?
 
also have you thought about making the myth setup wireless? maybe on a wireless N setup with like a 300Mb/s speed. im guessing a G network at 54 would be too slow to stream from the backend? just seems like a wireless network would really clean it up and get rid of wires running through your house from room to room.
 
also have you thought about making the myth setup wireless? maybe on a wireless N setup with like a 300Mb/s speed. im guessing a G network at 54 would be too slow to stream from the backend? just seems like a wireless network would really clean it up and get rid of wires running through your house from room to room.

When I finish that frontend in the bedroom, we will know that answer. I would imagine that a wireless connection could handle an mpeg2 stream or a divx stream. Heck, I know it'll do a divx stream with no problems.

That's G, of course. N would handle it without a doubt.
 
gotcha, i wasnt sure if it actually looked as good as the picture showed.

so when the output of the front end goes to an actual TV monitor, does it look better? like just as good as if you had the coax hooked up?

You mean like a good ol Svideo tube? You're stuck with running Myth at 640x480, but it'll look just like a cable box were connected to it.
 
i know you ended up not using the HD tuner. but how will that be better? you would need digital HD service from your cable provider to take advantage of it right? would you still need the HD box that the cable company gives you if you had your own tuner? would regular TV look better? or just the HD channels?

sorry for the 20 questions, but you seems to know much more about it :)
 
i know you ended up not using the HD tuner. but how will that be better? you would need digital HD service from your cable provider to take advantage of it right? would you still need the HD box that the cable company gives you if you had your own tuner? would regular TV look better? or just the HD channels?

sorry for the 20 questions, but you seems to know much more about it :)

The HD tuner that I took back only did over-the-air HD, not HD from cable or sat. There are tuners designed for digital cable (QAM), which should handle your HD cable content without a problem, providing your cable company doesn't encrypt the stream.
 
My first complaint!

You cannot change the majority of the metadata for a video/movie.

As just about anyone on here will tell you, I'm quite the anime freak. So of course I want to have all of this bubbly-eyed goodness at my beck and call just like my movies. Myth's good at that, I can have every single one of them play just fine... AVI, MKV, OGM, the whole shebang. However I cannot change any of the important data that Myth sets for movies such as the plot, publisher year, director, runtime, etc. IMDB's lookup will set all of that for DVDs, but otherwise you're a bit on the screwed side unless you tinker around with the MySQL database itself.

Having that would be REAL nice once I start adding Top Gear to the listings.
 
hey sabz, i have a question on how the front end works. theres no HDD in it right? how do you install an OS on it? or do you at all? and if not, how do you connect to the network with it? i mean you cant just simply plug in the wire and it works right? im just confused how you set it all up so that you can access the backend from the front end
 
hey sabz, i have a question on how the front end works. theres no HDD in it right? how do you install an OS on it? or do you at all? and if not, how do you connect to the network with it? i mean you cant just simply plug in the wire and it works right? im just confused how you set it all up so that you can access the backend from the front end

The frontend has a hard drive in it. It holds the OS and all the media codecs, players and apps for Myth, and the frontend app itself. Since it is a full blown PC, you can toss whatever you want on there... games, Firefox, Azureus, so on and so forth.

The network connection is normal ethernet. Just set it up to DHCP via your router like all the other machines on the network (EXCEPT THE BACKEND) and point the mythfrontend app at the backend's IP in its setup menu and you're running. Now, once you get into extra plugins like DVD players, media players, emulators, etc. is when you need to allow the frontend to mount the backend's drives. This works like any other drive and file sharing in a home network. Mount 'em, tell Myth where they are, and it does the rest.

There's no real magic to setting it up. Just think of it as an application instead of an all encompassing thing (because it is). It just so happens that this application sees particularly high usability on a PC connected to an entertainment center.
 
so i assume you have a fairly small HD in the front end then? since you wont really be storing any media on it. maybe like a 10-20 gig or something?

i was under the assumption that the front end didnt have a HDD. one, because i didnt see one in the pics, and 2 i thought it would just access everything it needed from the backend. i was just confused how you would set up the OS with no HD and no OS, but i see now that since it DOES have a HD it all makes sense now. thanks
 
well i just bought a few things to put together a front end system :)

heres what ive bought so far
ASUS P4M890 uATX MB
Intel Celeron 1.8GHz processor
1 gig ram
40 gig HDD
EVGA geForce 7300GT vid card
and a slim DVD burner/CD-ROM drive

and im keeping an eye on a nice little HTPC case on ebay. its very slim and will require me to get a right angle riser card to lay the vid card on its side. should be a sweet little setup.

sabz, is there any reason to go with one flavor of linux over another? ive used fedora and kubuntu, and i liked kubuntu better. will myth run fine on this? im going to test drive this myth TV thing on my current desktop as the backend, which isnt anything special really:

P4 2.4GHz
pvr150 tuner
1x 320 GB HDD (a tad small i know but its just to start)
1 gig ram
ATI 9600 vid card

im just starting to play around with the emulators and such. its currently running XP pro. and everything works fine. but myth seems to have more options. i will rarely record shows and use it to play games from emulators on the backend. or should emulators be stored on the front end? i also really like the mythtv features that give show info when you go to it and everything. or do you think Media Center is better for me?
 
I went with Gentoo because it's an excellent distribution and also the howto wikis make it painless to set up. Just follow the Gentoo handbook for base install, then follow the MythTV Gentoo handbook and you'll have a system running in fairly decent time.
 
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