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[UPDATE 7/01/05]

So I got bored messing with my MythTV system and decided to look for something interesting to do. I remember seeing something on the mailing list a few months back about streaming content from mythweb to any other machine. True streaming, not just sending the file over http or samba. After some googling, I found it- MythStreamTV. Fairly painless to install on a debian based system where you can apt-get all the dependencies. Works great- I can watch recordings from any computer, even from work (if I scale the video and audio back to postage stamp sized.)While looking for MythStreamTV, I found MythStream, which is a streaming audio / video plugin for mythfrontend. It has a nice UI for managing streams, including podcasts, real audio feeds, RSS lists of streams, etc. I ended up having to recompile mplayer to support real and windows media formats, but once that was done, it works well. Another plugin that I found was MythWifi, which is a two part plugin- one part sits on the frontend and opens a socket waiting for connection, and the other sits on the backend and provides a UI for a PDA via http. The purpose of the plugin is to be able to take a PDA connected to your network via WiFi and be able to control a frontend machine over the network. This is really useful for something like mythmusic, where you might not be in the same room as the machine, but you want to change the music.

[UPDATE 6/02/05]

This weekend, I picked up a second xbox to use as a MythTV frontend. This one is to go in the game room where I have a 37" television / monitor. I had problems trying to load linux via the mechassault method, so I did a raw disk copy from my working xbox to this new one. Had a few scares where the xbox wouldn't boot, but eventually I got it to work. I didn't want to run an ethernet cable to this box (c'mon, it's June in Texas, do you really think I'm going to climb into my attic in THIS weather?) so I picked up a linksys 802.11G 'game adapter' for it. Works nicely. One thing that I noticed since upgrading to v0.18 of MythTV via Matt Zimmerman's .debs- some of the plugins aren't included in his packages. So I manually compiled mythweather, mythgallery, and mythgame on the xbox. I don't know, it just feels perverse playing old arcade or super nintendo entertainment system games on microsoft hardware running linux.

[UPDATE 5/15/05]

This week / weekend, I've been updating all of our boxes to MythTV v0.18. Even though v0.18 has been out for a while, I needed to wait until the Debian files from Matt Zimmerman were available so that I could upgrade the xbox. I chose to upgrade all my other boxes via Knoppmyth since this version also includes support for the mini-itx's CLE266 video out chipset.

[UPDATE] 1/2/05

Well, I finally decided to do away with the little $99 machine. Since the slave backend I've been running seems really stable and uber-powerful, I figured it would make an awesome backend. So I did a database export on the little box, copied off my customizations to the mythweb pda theme I'm working on, and any other little bits and bobs that I've got stashed on that box. On the slave backend, I started up mysql, imported the export from the other box after changing the hostname, and bingo, done.

[UPDATE] 8/1/04

Okay, so here's something silly. I have been trying to think of somthing to do with the 27" LED sign that I have sitting above my book case. I picked it up for my TAN project, but that didn't work out. Sending data to the sign is much easier under linux than windows. So I wrote a little tcl script that parses the myth status page every thirty minutes, and if the status has changed for any encoder, updates the display on the sign. Pic1, Pic2, Pic3.

[UPDATE] 7/14/04

I've been meaning to set up a second PVR-250 with my system to accomodate the rare conflict I have with scheduling. I say rare, because myth's scheduler is just so damn smart. It will shuffle recording schedules around until it can record everything you ask it to. However, my wife told me some program she wants to record this fall is in direct conflict with another, and both are shown only once a week. I picked up an intel mobo / 2.4ghz celeron and another PVR-250. I had originally thought about just adding another card to my existing backend. However, it took a lot of time to get it set up just right, and it uses the stock 0.1.9 version of the ivtv driver. That version doesn't support multiple card types in the same machine. So if I wanted to add it to my existing system, I faced potential downtime and negative impact on the WAF. (Wife Acceptance Factor)

So after installing KnoppMyth on this new box, I set it up to connect to the master backend. All looked good. Until I tried watching liveTV on the second tuner. Static / Snow. Err. Okay, so I guess it's not a tuner type 2. I loaded the tveeprom module to diagnose what type it is. and I get.. "tvee: tuner= (idx=82, type=-1)." Hrmmph. I googled, I searched mailing lists, I looked high and low. I jumped on #mythtv-users and found another user experiencing the same exact problem. He peeled back the stickers on his and found "TAPC-H971F 405A2503" on the bottom sticker and LG stamped into the metal.

Looking through the ivtv / tuner source code, we noticed that most of the LG tuners were PAL, except for one.. LG_NTSC_NEW_TAPC (ID #39). Now, I'd already gotten the latest ivtv that I could find (pre2-ck100) so then I change 'options tuner type=2' to 'options tuner type=39'. Boom! That did it. I don't know if you also have to have the latest drivers, but these new US PVR-250s in the newer box seem to work with type=39

[UPDATE] 5/1/04

I've been really disappointed with the games coming out for the xbox. I guess I'm kind of old school when it comes to console gaming. I found myself playing games on my PC instead of the xbox. So, I started looking at how to mod the xbox to run linux. I checked out modchips and such, but I really couldn't find a comprehensive guide on how to do that and which chip does what.. I stumbled on the sourceforge page describing the 'mechassault' method of getting your dashboard patched to support linux. Once the xbox-myth project got to version 0.4.3, I figured it was time to jump in. First thing was to take of my xbox cables and combine it with a USB extension cable. Xbox male end + USB female end = USB cable for the xbox. With that, you can connect up USB keyboards and mice to the xbox. Cool thing is that if you take the two leftover pieces and connect them together, you get a cable that's USB male and xbox female.. What's cool is that there's a windows driver for the xpad xbox controller for windows as well as linux. So when halo2 comes out for the PC, you can use an xbox controller to play.

With the cable in place, I then had to find some device that the xbox would see as a memory unit, and linux would see as a USB mass storage device. The reason is that you want to be able to copy the special MechAssault savegames to the xbox hard drive. I tried every lipstick drive, digital camera, and x-in-1 card adapter I had. Eventually, I found that my sandisk smartmedia USB reader would be seen as a xbox memory unit and worked under linux. Once I got the images transferred to the xbox hard drive, I copied them off to a regular xbox memory unit. With those images installed, I went to Best Buy and picked up a copy of MechAssault. Unfortunately, I didn't read the directions on the sourceforge page well enough. Again, spending money before doing my due diligence. I dropped by GameStop and got a used v1.0 copy of Mechassault and away I went. With linux installed, installing xbox-myth was a piece of cake. The xbox went to the wife's office. Now every TV that we use has a mythfrontend associated with it.