the shorts stats:
We've got an old p3 500 with an ATI rage 128 with TV out. Added a 250gig drive and a wireless netgear card. Mandriva 2007 club powerpack with all the latest updates. Latest MythTV via plf urpmi, latest Lirc- dl'd direct. (I'm not tied to a specific distro, mdv was convenient)
The traumas:
- Xorg's ati driver killed the TV out, so my crutch- fbdev driver- which thus far works. I'm assuming I'm losing some performance this route, but again- It works. I'd appreciate any help on that aspect.
- Mplayer stops responding to keys presses during playback. Which sucks! Especially when you start playing a file you've already seen. I've had a couple suggestions about conflicting daemons and whatnot, but non of that helped. To avoid all this I've shifted to VLC, but it has issues to. But again, it works. Now the issue is between the two players, they each have some files they will and won't play.. so find myself having to jump back and forth between the two to playback everything.
- MythTV also has issues with some characters in file names. Which causes problems when an entire series is in the format “Showname [S##E##] - Episode Name” ... so that when you're browsing with MythTV you just get “Showname – Episode Name” and if you don't know better- you end up watching everything out of order! Very frustrating. And my wife may kill me over it. Working on my bash scripting to strip the brackets from all file names.. but uh.. not the most graceful of answers, and as of yet, I'm not so great at it.
- I've got my mythtv user setup to use MythTVfrontend as the desktop manager or whatnot. But.... I can't get the screensaver/blanking to cease. Its not an issue while video is playing back, but if the weather module or something is just sitting there, then its an issue.
- Speaking of which, the weather module has issues. Its stuck telling me about friday. Doesn't matter when today is, it likes to show fridays' weather. Minor annoyance.
- Major failing: (hardware, but I'm still open to suggestions) my PCI slots number 3 and 4 just don't work. I've tried 2 different makes, 4 different instances of tv tuners, nada. I've tried my ethernet card in them that worked fine everywhere else, and it didn't work consistently there either. I've dug through the BIOS settings and can't find a thing.
- How can I set it to be a different desktop manager if I'm stuck in MythTVfrontend? If only to tweak the screensaver/powersave features?
- Anyone know where to find the Mandriva/KDE (I don't know which) menu item for configuring lirc? I've installed everything lirc related I can find and nothing, and went back to just the base package directly from lirc's site. On that tangent- any suggestions and guidance on getting x10's mp3anywhere serial remote to work with mythTV or as a remote mouse kinda thing.. that'd be especially handy, and greatly appreciated.
Feature Requests/Thoughts-
- Integrated bittorrent/rss feed reader? For those of us who can't get the dang tuner working?
- I'm thinking of editing the menu system and greatly reducing the feature set, but it brings me back to the question of- I'm stripping so much away from MythTV, is it just the wrong tool for this task? Any suggestions on menu editing?
- Performance enhancement- the mysql db for my uses seems overkill, can I kill it and just use the frontend? Is there any other internal modules/aspects I can strip out for simple file playback? And again, is there another option? Some non-x-windows graphical interface that can browse thumbnails of video files (the music and picture functionality would be nice too) and then playback via tv-out (or later vga maybe?)
- is there a TV oriented version of imdb? Something that could handle episode names, season numbers, show logo, episode information, etc.. something that could automagically fill in details of all this stuff? Especially since the wife (primary driver of the project) is a TV addict.
- It'd be a real huge thing if the flash playback direct from the networks sites could be integrated... just throwing that out there. I mean, transcode/mencoder can handle it, right?
I'm also considering seeing how playback works if my video directory is a nfs share from my file server, across the 802.11g link. Any experiences with this? guidance/thoughts/suggestions? Its either that or rsync or some such option to keep the main file server that currently handles downloads up to date with the myth box. Cause currently, this whole manually deleting files form two machines thing is not fun.
Also, does anyone have any thoughts on basically having two mythtv logins on one machine.. one for the parents (all those darn cop/serial murder/legal shows for the wife, plus delete rights), one for the kids? (limited selection, no deleting or any other system function).. In the best case scenario I'm thinking icon based user selection, password would be something that could be input via remote (if it ever works)
ok, that's all for now. I'm pretty sure I've past this being a functional request for help- but don't let that stop you from responding!!!
Thank you to all who read this in its entirety.