mythtv

My adventures with mythtv started with ATI's AIW 9700 Pro. Actually, there was no start. This hardware did not work well with linux as a tuner. So it was back to MMC and M$. Talk about temperamental. hardware was an Athlon XP 2500+ overclocked to ~ 2 Ghz.

The adventure really started when I got an Avermedia A180 digital tuner. It went into this box and after the requisite googling and talking to learned friends, viola: there was recording and such. Add a $20/year account at schedulesdirect.org for 2 week listings, and it was not a bad system: record and playback 1080p HDTV; So what if CPU was almost 100% used. But, how did that song go? ".... something's better than nothing yes, but nothing's better than more .... ". Why restrict ourselves to 1 tuner and recording only 1 program at a time ? We were moving up in the mythtv world. Add a hybrid tuner that can record analog and digital programming. Add storage and converge on two storage groups on two HDDs instead of a RAID. Add a mac mini near the TV and you have a pretty usable system. So what if it was an old tube tv and we couldn't watch HD on a G4 mac mini.

Pretty good WAF. HD plays well wirelessly on a Dell latitude 620.

Sadly, the recording system (backend) went down a few months ago, which brings us to the present day setup. I rebuilt the computer with a hand-me-down Athlon64 3400 and a new Nvidia 9500 GT with VDPAU. Now mplayer can play 1080p with mythtv possible.

Le tour is not as long to watch at double speed and without ads.

And then I lost the frontend on the backend because I "upgraded". When will I learn to leave things alone. I was just trying to fix the occasional "analog recordings have chipmunk audio" problem.

And then, a flash flood reminded me that these are just boxes and this is just TV.

Phew. Save really did mean save, even if it took a couple of clicks to get to it. So what I wrote at 1 am this morning and forgot to publish, was saved and here it is.

Enough. For now.