mythtv

Most people will never know that their MyhTV frontend may be throwing errors after trying to increase audio buffer sizes. You can normally hear clicks or pops in the sound if your audio buffers are too low. I've only ever noticed this myself on sources with DTS-HD sound, but the errors are there for my normal cable sources as well.

With my HD HomeRun Prime scheduled to ship next week, I decided it was a good idea to get a CableCard self install kit from Comcast so that I am ready to go when my tuner arrives. Needless to say, as is with most dealings with Comcast, it was a very maddening experience. I am posting my results since they will be helpful to others, leave a comment if you have any useful information to add or have better results than I did.

A good portion of my time is spent recommending hardware to users. I figured documenting what hardware I use may save me some time, so here goes. I attempted to find Amazon links for all the parts, but quite a few of them seem to be obsolete by now.

This one should help out any non-technical MythTV user. The most common issue I run into is when my wife goes to control the frontend and it has lost sync with the backend (most of the time because I was working on something and forgot to check on things when I was done). Simply restarting the frontend fixes these issues, but she doesn't know how to ssh in and handle this task, so lets make a button (or series if you want to be safe) on the remote do it for her.

Last night I completed my first pass on packaging the latest HDHomeRun configuration utility (GUI now included). This was my first package using deb helper 7 (boy is it nice!). All of this work will be making its way into the Lucid release, but for the time being I have uploaded it to the Mythbuntu Testing PPA.

MythTV 0.22 introduces us to storage groups across the board. This is no doubt a great thing, no more creating shares for network access, no more worrying about running out of storage space. With that said, there is one drawback to the new storage groups, they break playback of ISO files and VIDEO_TS folders. For those of us who have our DVD collections ready to go in digital form this may be an issue. This issue has been fixed in MythTV 0.24 (but only for unencrypted ISOs), the following work around will help you with all other cases:

In past revisions of Ubuntu the Antec Fusion's iMon Pad VFD was very easy to configure. In Karmic there is a little bit of an issue where the lirc_imon module does not detect the VFD correctly. The following directions should get you up and running:

This is my first review, and I suck at English, so things may get a bit rough. Anyways, here goes!

System76 makes what could be the perfect MythTV frontend, the Meerkat Ion NetTop.

This tiny little box packs a ton of power, it can offload nearly all video rendering to the Ion's GPU. This gives us seamless HD playback on a low powered, low cost box starting at $350.