1
May
MythTV and XBMC
I said a couple of weeks back that I have been playing around with MythTV. At first I installed Mythbuntu, messed around a little then restored the computer back to XP using Windows Home Server but then I decided i wanted to have a play with Mythtv on Gentoo I tried but my CD drive couldn’t burn the Gentoo disc so I got annoyed and reinstalled mythbuntu.
I’ve now been recording various TV shows with easy and no real issues for the last couple of weeks. Although I have to say I have not really hit the limts and don’t really watch that much TV. I got a second TV card so that I could watch and and record a different channel but I have to get the proper cables to split the ariel feed.
It was nice to wake up at a normal time and watch the Chinese Grand Prix before the replay on BBC One in the afternoon. The web interface it pretty simple to use and I’ve set it all up so that if at work I remember I want to watch something I can login and set it to record. Bet Sky+ doesn’t let you do that now does it! I have a suspicion that it doesn’t properly flag up commercials but I’ve only watched recorded shows from the BBC channels so not sure yet.
The whole system though is pretty much complete now I got a MCE remote control off ebay which gives its the proper feeling of a TV rather than controlling it from a keyboard. I’ve had to wait a while though I think it got held up at the airport what with the UK airspace being shutdown, it was a seller in Hong Kong.
I was surprised at how easy the remote was to set-up, I just had to select the MCE remote from the Myth Control panel and reboot. I expected an evening of a mixture of googling and pulling my hair out…
I’ve been pretty much mainly using XBMC as a frontend as XBMC can access Myth’s recorded files which is pretty neat! Next step though is to hook it up to my 5.1 speakers, the Logitech 5500′s and get a HD tuner, oh and a bigger TV and a new laptop!
6
Apr
MythTV – First Encounter
Over the bank holiday weekend I’ve set myself up with MythTV. A Mythbuntu install to be precise. I’ve been quite impressed with it although its taken a little trial and error effort over the weekend but though no fault of Myth.
Firstly I had it setup on my laptop that is slowly dying. Using the laptop I wasn’t really impressed with the DVB-T adapter. I was using a AVerTV DVB-T Volar. That Wiki link helped a bit by suggesting to upgrade the firmware but I was only getting one channel. I was using the aerial on the roof in which I have a handy socket to connect to in my room (Although that’s what I thought!). I was only getting BBC parliament which was no good at all considering the amount of other channels I should be receiving.
I’ve now set it up on Tucker, a computer I use for random things. Tucker has an AMD AM2 X2 5000+ and 4GB which is a bit OTT for Myth but its what I have. I had popped in to town on Saturday and decided to spend an Argos gift voucher I had. I got an amplified indoor aerial. I hooked it all up and did a channel scan, made a cup of tea and to my surprise Myth had found a whole load of channels, BBC One, BBC Three and even some Radio channels if not all of them.
Maybe a cup of tea does solve everything. I didn’t expect much as every time I set-up the AverTV DVB-T Volar stick with Windows it would fail completely, the software isn’t the best in my opinion.
Anyway it was great I could watch live TV, pause it and rewind it I’ve even integrated XBMC so I can watch other TV Shows and Films.
I only downside so far is that I don’t get any channels on MUX2. That’s ITV, Five, etc. This isn’t surprising as according to ukfree.tv the rating for the local transmitter for MUX2 is quite low. I figure because I am using an indoor aerial and between the two is at least a house the signal must be getting blocked. I thought I’d check out why the roof aerial was performing badly. I have a nose outside and I find this…
The two cables should actually be connected. Not too much of an issue really, I plan to set this up properly when I move back to Stafford but its been a good little exercise so far and I hope to write up some more detail of my experiences with it on here.
Although I say that with a lot of things.
9
Mar
Linux Hosted
Over the weekend with some holiday time I’ve been back to my home town for a little break from city life. I went back Thursday night and came back to Birmingham very late monday night/early Tuesday. I was late as I had randomly ended up in Leicester with one of my good friends and we had gone to see Alice in Wonderland, which was pretty good.
It had been quite an eventful but great weekend, saw the family and friends, witnessed a car crash in which the offending party hopped up and drove off and moved my website to my linux host. I’m trying to make room for another server so I’m consolidating various services so I can free up an IP address but a new virtual machine running exchange2010.
The move didn’t go as smoothly as I had planned, the application I used to create a dump of the DB has filled it with random text doubling the file size and caused lots of issues when I went to load it up. I instead reverted back to using MySQLDump on the Windows command line console.
Didn’t have many issues with the new setup, Apache 2.0 didn’t like the previous .htaccess and reported an “Internal Error Page” was quite annoying as I didn’t know what was going on until I checked the logs. After loading up the proper .htaccess file I just needed to enable mod_rewrite using the following command.
a2enmode rewrite
I’m pretty happy everything is working now, one thing that did annoy me running WordPress in ISS 6.0 is that the WordPress iPhone apps did not work but now that do as I’m back on linux so look out for a few more picture uploads.
Just one more site to move and I should be able to setup Exchange2010.