{"id":12,"date":"2005-02-27T16:17:26","date_gmt":"2005-02-27T15:17:26","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2006-08-08T19:36:46","modified_gmt":"2006-08-08T18:36:46","slug":"knowing-when-to-quit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/?p=12","title":{"rendered":"Knowing When To Quit"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve spent something like nine hours this weekend trying to get my
\nMythTV box into a working state. I shall take a short look back over
\nthe obstacles I’ve already overcome and the reasons why I’ve decided
\nthat my sanity is worth more than \u00ef\u00bf\u00bd30.<\/p>\n


\nThe motley pile of electronics sat under the TV has begun to annoy me.
\nWe have four separate devices and four separate remotes. None of which
\nwork terribly well together. The freeview controler is going gradually
\ninsane in its old age and the VCR sounds like helicopter when it’s
\nrecording. Plus it’s all so un-networked. I hate the fact that I can’t
\nwatch shows I’ve downloaded on the big TV in the living room or watch
\ndigital TV in the bedroom.<\/p>\n

So I have this dream that I can replace all these devices with one
\nshiny new computerized machine that will lead us all into the promised
\nland of networked entertainment. I want something that can play and
\nrecord digital TV, play DVDs and MP3s and AVIs and MOVs. And that can
\ndo all that over the network.<\/p>\n

Step one of my plan for global domination is complete. The house is now
\ncovered by an 802.11g network. This took all of half an hour to set up
\nand has been working flawlessly ever since.<\/p>\n

I’ll spare you the gory details of actually building the machine and instead give you a run down of the components.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Athlon64 CPU – this gives me an excuse to place with 64bit linux. It’s totally unnecessary to the working of the machine.<\/li>\n
  2. 2x Hauppauge Nova-T digital terrestrial TV capture cards -These
    \nare pretty much the only DVB-T cards you can buy with any ease. I
    \nwanted two so that I could play and record at the same time.<\/li>\n
  3. 4x 200GB SATA drives – The more space the better I say. Plus I
    \nhaven’t played with serial ATA yet and this seems like the perfect
    \nexcuse.<\/li>\n
  4. nVida FX5200 Graphics card with TV-out – I’m extrememly familiar
    \nwith the ins and outs of the nvidia binary driver so I was pretty sure
    \nI could get the TV-out on this working. It’s also dirt cheap.<\/li>\n
  5. Onboard sound – you don’t need facy sound so why spend the money?
    \nIf I was plugging this into a surround sound system I might buy
    \nsomething special.<\/li>\n
  6. Atheros based 802.11g wireless card – pretty self explanatory really.<\/li>\n
  7. Pioneer DVD RW – I’ll probably never write DVDs on it but they are so cheap now that I couldn’t resist.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I wrapped this all up in a midi tower case from Antec. My basic feeling
    \nis that it’s much easier to make a big case quieter and I value silence
    \nover visual aesthetics. Plus I couldn’t have fitted all that gear into
    \na mini-ITX box anyway.<\/p>\n

    Thanks to all the extra packages at Atrpms the multimedia capabilities
    \nof Fedora Core 3 can be made to work pretty much out of the box. There
    \nare even packages for the wireless drivers and the cx88 drivers that
    \nmake the NOVA-T capture cards work. I was massivley impressed I thought
    \nI might even get away without recompiling a kernel.<\/p>\n

    And then I came to getting the remote control to work. Oh boy. After
    \nseveral days of patching kernels, rebuilding video4linux out of CVS and
    \ntrying to understand the complexities of lirc I’ve got to the stage
    \nwhere I can get the OK button of my remote control to work.<\/p>\n

    However there exists a solution in the form of an extremely simple IR
    \nreciever called irman. You can buy them here in the UK for abour \u00ef\u00bf\u00bd30
    \neach. It works with practically any remote control and has been
    \nsupported in lirc for a long time. It seems likely that the cx88
    \ndrivers out of video4linux will support the remote properly in a couple
    \nof months but I’ve reached the point where I can’t wait any longer.<\/p>\n

    There are also a number of reasons why an external IR reciever is
    \nbetter than using the one built into the TV card. If I upgrade the TV
    \ncards I won’t lose the remote control finctionality. It my remote
    \nbreaks I can replace it with a generic remote and things will still
    \nwork.<\/p>\n

    I think that is enough rambling for one day I’ll let you know how it goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’ve spent something like nine hours this weekend trying to get my MythTV box into a working state. I shall take a short look back over the obstacles I’ve already overcome and the reasons why I’ve decided that my sanity is worth more than \u00ef\u00bf\u00bd30.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}